By David Jordan
A genius in the wood,
The wood of the postmodern,
A genius at play, dancing,
Lighting the way
With good laughter and song.
Scealai!
File!
The grey wood’s guiding light.
Star of Ireland:
Its angel and its eye.
Son of light,
O flower of the fair city
Won’t you show me again?
They say there is prose and verse and you can have poetry in either. This 
strikes me as true.
Literature is an art, not a science. Living is an art, not a science. This is why the term ‘Arts’ is often associated with, and even interchangeable with, the term ‘Humanities’.
The American poet, Jim Morrison, was once asked about the cross he wore around his neck at the Doors’ famous gig at the Hollywood Bowl in 1968. He said, ‘it’s just a symbol. It doesn’t mean anything.’ At first this might seem a contradiction: you might argue that a symbol is all about meaning. You might say that a cross is a symbol of suffering. That is its meaning. I think what Morrison was trying to indicate was the difference between a fact and a symbol. Facts have an exact meaning. They are scientific. Symbols don’t have an exact meaning. In fact, they don’t say anything at all. They suggest. They have multiple aspects. Symbolism is at home in verse but it should be present in prose also, or any prose that sees itself as literary.
Yes, there is logic and science in literature, only it should serve the symbolic, the imaginative and the poetic. I believe a writer achieves maturity when he comes into awareness of the symbolic. When he begins to manipulate symbols in order to suggest and play with possible meanings. The mature writer knows how to strike a balance between symbolism and logic. The concrete nature of symbols allows him to play with them in his art. You can’t play around with abstracts because they can’t be visualized or imagined. That is why too much abstraction is a flaw in literature – it goes against the imagination and the imagination is paramount in literature in all its forms.
Consider Homer, the first poet of Western Civilisation and then consider Seamus Heaney, one of the greatest poets of the last fifty years or so. They both worked with concrete. With that which can be visualized and imagined. They worked with symbols.
Life is mysterious and writers can only capture a portion of that mystery through symbols. Life is messy and mixed up and confusing an only the mirror of art can reflect this. A good story, just like a good poem, shouldn’t have a precise meaning. It should only give you something to think about. It should suggest, allude and indicate. It should never impose itself. It should never enforce. It should never moralize except in the most general of senses e.g. it’s wrong to take another life. Good literature is an invitation to play – play with the intellect, the feelings and the emotions. Only when you master this will you become a good writer. Some of us master it at a young age. Some of us have to wait a few years and some never master it at all. It is a mixture of imagination and intuition, two terms that are alien to science and even craftsmanship. No matter how much you read and discover, there is no formula for it. You must simply write to get to it, to get to the ‘good stuff’, and, if you are lucky, you will.
By David Jordan
Thoughts born out of nowhere
Like the goddess Athena.
Your mind flashing with intuition.
Or, under the sun, a sword
At play, flashing
On a perfect day.
With a blade that kept its edge
And its passion over time,
As the darkness came.
On death cast a cold eye
He dared to write.
The sweet sounds, rhythms
And repetitions:
Instinctual, musical, masterful.
And the imagination
Like a Titan, towering,
Watching the ever changing, soaring
Pleasure dome.
And the discipline of the
Craftsman, the technician,
Shaping the iron, ever cooling,
Working it into perfection:
The master at play.
A wordsmith:
This man was born to do it.
By David Jordan
I awoke to muddy boots,
My clothes soaked and stinking of urine.
Reject of Dionysus I am.
I remembered everything:
Stumbling in the dark, on the grass,
On the riverbank, like a rat.
Reject of Dionysus I am.
I can hear his laughter.
Old habits and behaviours reappear,
Madness, danger and fear.
Wasted days, wasted years.
Reject of Dionysus I am.
Damn you Dionysus!
With your leopards
And your laughter
And your car!
I follow Apollo.
Gladly, I toss away my thyrsus
On the riverbank.
I awake from stupor
To reason and intellect and imagination.
To the spring of the muses,
So cool and clear and clean.
Yes, there is nothing better on this earth,
I tell you, than to kiss that limpid water.
By David Jordan
One day
When I’m out of bed, bad blood and
Curses, maybe I’ll smile under the
Cool moon.
See her wrapped in a
Cloud mantle,
Reveal herself,
Then cover up again.
See her hang there, full,
Like a silver pendant.
A calm unwinking eye.
See her radiate and glow
The way women glow
Sometimes.
See her move slowly and
Silently across the sky
Like a huntress.
What else can I do but try
To please her with my pen,
Solitary, romantic old fool
That I am?
By David Jordan
I swear these long nights
Stir my blood
And steer my spirit northward
Like a long boat headed home.
For the imagination feeds
On the darkness like a flame
And tonight I imagine myself as
A man of the North:
Cross countenance, long bones.
Leaping on to the sandy shore.
Bringing alien gods to the natives:
The loquacious Gael.
The nature loving, melancholy,
Aristocratic Gael.
After a thousand years
Surely the stranger is gone from the house?
Tonight, I swear I am a citizen
Of the imagination:
Emancipated.
In flight.
By David Jordan
The carriage rocks you into a semi trance.
Everywhere you look there is a reflected countenance.
Across the aisle a mother and child
Play pen and paper games
With subdued voices.
A man drinks beer from a can stoically.
Strangers exchange non-committal words
And glances.
Then the darkness descends outside,
Bringing with it a feeling of dislocation
But also solidarity
As we are visited by the ghost, Society.
When we arrive our brief companionship
Is broken up with polite smiles and
Valedictions.
Society disappears once it has done its task:
To keep the darkness out,
Defeat the monster in the glass.
By David Jordan
The sky was on fire.
The sea, monstrous
As we walked on the hazardous
Roof of the old Big House.
I was high on destiny.
Night fall, full of fear,
We left the fire to commune
With ghosts in the pitch black
Rooms and corridors.
Someday, if we ever return,
We will look for ghosts of ourselves.
We will stop and listen for footsteps
And voices
And we will watch for figments of lighter
Flame in the darkness.
For who can deny the sweets of memory?
It is easier to deny the raging sky
And the ravenous sea.
This is one of my favourite Seamus Heaney poems. It’s from his 1969 
collection, Door into the Dark. I think the key to understanding the poem is the Eleusian mysteries practised by the ancient Greeks. The man in the poem is basically giving the role of the corn goddess, Demeter, to the woman, though she doesn’t know it. It’s a measure of how much he loves her but she is mystified.
I think a knowledge of the Classics helps to understand much of Heaney’s poetry.
The Wife’s Tale
By Seamus Heaney
When I had spread it all on linen cloth
Under the hedge, I called them over.
The hum and gulp of the thresher ran down
And the big belt slewed to a standstill, straw
Hanging undelivered in the jaws.
There was such quiet that I heard their boots
Crunching the stubble twenty yards away.
He lay down and said, ‘Give these fellows theirs,
I’m in no hurry,’ plucking grass in handfuls
And tossing it in the air. ‘That looks well.’
(He nodded at my white cloth on the grass.)
‘I declare a woman could lay out a field
Though boys like us have little call for cloths.’
He winked, then watched me as I poured a cup
And buttered the thick slices that he likes.
‘It’s threshing better than I thought, and mid
It’s good clean seed. Away over there and look.’
Always this inspection has to be made
Even when I don’t know what to look for.
But I ran my hand in the half-filled bags
Hooked to the slots. It was hard as shot,
Innumerable and cool. The bags gaped
Where the chutes ran back to the stilled drum
And forks were stuck at angles in the ground
As javelins might mark lost battlefields.
I moved between them back across the stubble.
They lay in the ring of their own crusts and dregs,
Smoking and saying nothing. ‘There’s good yield,
Isn’t there?’ –as proud as if he were the land itself–
‘Enough for crushing and sowing both.’
And that was it. I’d come and he had shown me,
So I belonged no further to the work.
I gathered cups and folded up the cloth
And went. But they still kept their ease,
Spread out, unbuttoned, grateful, under the trees.
Many people have trouble reading the Classics, both ancient and modern. This is because we live in a culture of instant gratification. We are used to 
reading passively. The key to understanding literature prior to the age of instant gratification is ‘active’ reading. People must change the way they approach these works. They need to change their mindsets. They need to read actively.
Think of all the great literature that has been written prior to the 20th century, going all the way back to Homer and the dawn of Western literature over 2600 years ago.
You don’t know what you are missing!
Most people think that fantasy, as a genre, was born in the 20th century with the advent of the great imagineer, J.R.R. Tolkien. Not true. The first great work of fantasy literature was Homer’s second epic, the Odyssey. And there have been many great imagineers over the ages. One of the greatest is the English visionary poet and painter, William Blake. But people are turned off these authors because they are too ‘difficult’.
All that is needed is some active reading and you can access these works and their like. You don’t need to be an English professor. You don’t even need to be an English graduate. All you need to be is someone who loves to read. So, what exactly is active reading? Basically, it means thinking about the text. It means asking questions. It means using your own knowledge and experience to make sense of the text, to make it meaningful. It means constructing meaning out of what is already inside you and what you are encountering in the text.
Making the transition from passive to active reading is easy and incredibly rewarding. You don’t need to spend three years in college. It’s just a matter of using your God given intellect to extract meaning from the text, to see shapes and patterns in it. This is true ‘reading’, not just taking in words but actively engaging with them.
We’ve already mentioned Blake. A lot of his poetry is challenging but if you take the active approach it is immensely rewarding. A good place to start active, analytical reading is his Songs of Innocence and Experience. They seem simple on the surface but if you take the time to really read them you will discover hidden depths and layers. New meanings will spring out of the text.
Reading the ancient Classics is also a good place to start, as many classical works have a mechanical quality: they are full of mechanisms and devices which makes them easier to analyse. They also tend to be very structured which makes it easier on the active reader. Of course, these are vast generalisations but they serve our purpose here and hopefully they will embolden you to read the likes of Homer, Sophocles and Virgil.
The important thing to remember is not to be intimidated by literature that is pre 20th century. All you need to do is approach it with a different mindset. Get into a different way of thinking. An objective way of thinking. That and, of course, a library ticket!
Shadow of the Glen 