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Identity and Genius (Writing 2023)

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Is 2023 a year in some form of demonic possession? It’s been pretty dark for us so far but strangely one of my most productive writing periods for years. The metaphor of the band continuing to play as the Titanic sank comes to mind, but more positively maybe the writing was a way of getting through. Identity Theft Poems One of the major horrors has been a sophisticated Identity Theft fraud - malevolent actions full of unpleasantness and threatening developments every day for literally weeks. In poetic terms it raised all sorts of issues about identity and the experience of identification of self, generating material questions about the nature identity itself, material turned into poems. I wouldn’t recommend fraud as a way of kickstarting a project, and it didn’t exist in my work plans in June but now I have more than half a book’s worth of intense poems with more in urgent draft. One of the poems ‘Hymn’ is a eulogy for the loss of Barney and will form part of a forthcoming exhibiti
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The Last International Poetry Dog Day

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This would have been the 15th birthday of Barney , the famous Poetry Dog  - he missed it by one month. We have been touched by the outpouring of condolence for him. So I thought a last acknowledgement of his status in the Poetry World was a suitable memorial.  Ron Silliman, Tony Lopez, Tony Trehy, Christian Bök (Text Festival)
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The King's Basement

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  The King’s Basement   Bedside manners are extra prayers empty, As succession entropic acts A new stamp a new head posted to Ipatiev House . Usurping timorous laureation we must to Ipatiev House Search engines at the ready, to calculate the difference … a falling blade, A spike, a headshot, a poll ending with a hung result.   Coronation words and celebratory foods, chicken, charcuntery, and inertia Until when the poor will eat promises All unusual and active vectors orient to Ipatiev House, The Rite of Passage for all kings. Search engine differentials calculate the museological relevance of a meat-hook,      or a headshot, a poll resulting in a crumbling Bourbon end. Big fat hands gasping for air – as entitlement is to justified, as ascension is to basement.  
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The Bijouterie of Winnie and the Shiba Fellas

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On social media, at the beginning of the war, the CIA unleased an army of twitter 'campaigners'/bots supporting Ukraine (at the same time preparing cyber tactics for Taiwan for the coming war with China which the US will manufacture after the Ukraine). They created the identities in the first instance by appropriating a subculture from computer gaming where cool teen gamers used cartoon dog-human hybrids as their avatars and called themselves 'fellas'. The second 'anti-China' 'army' similarly adopted an animal persona - this time Winnie the Pooh, because there had previously been a campaign suggesting that Xi Jinping looked like Pooh and had therefore banned Winnie the Pooh from China - untrue of course. If you look at Fella twitter accounts they often don't even hide their location is 'Langley' (the CIA HQ). It initiates pile-ons, cyber bullying and abuse campaigns, as you'd expect frequently racist and misogynist. Yesterday, a North Atl
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Stalin

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The other day I was calling out the latest American Empire colour revolution on social media. It doesn't matter which one it was because I've counted another 2 or 3 more since I posted it. Anyway, some big-gob/bot/whatever (unknown to me but apparently a follower of other people I know), barged onto my time-line to accuse me of being a 'Stalinoid'. Hard to think of a more adolescently feeble 'insult', but it reminded me that while back I wrote a two-part piece about Stalin for my 'Dyer & Mahfouz' Collection. So this is a good excuse to roll it out: The Birth of Stalin Gerard Trehy had been an active shop steward in the building trade in the 1960s. He’d stood against old style bosses alongside the legendary firebrand Union man, ‘Red’ Eric Heffer. So, when I began work, my very first job, and almost immediately got ‘volunteered’/put myself forward to be a shop steward, I asked for his advice. He said: “the thing to watch out for is at some future uni
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Broadside

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Soon after arriving in Portugal, I was introduced to the American artist Marsha McDonald by the inestimable Marton Koppany. It's a small world since it appears there's a fair degree of overlap between our networks, but we didn't know of each other until we met in Porto. It turns out that we also have a mutual friend in Robert Grenier , and maybe in a nod to the form of his 'Sentences', Marsha and I have collaborated on a Limited Edition 'Broadside'.  The set of 7 prints features Marsha's photography juxtaposed with four of my new poems (Indigo, The Last Time, The Tree of Moments, and Types of Failure.  They are available from me (tonytrehy@ymail.com) or Marsha (marsham6@gmail.com)  for 10 euros (plus postage/packaging).
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Funeral Poetry

Like any other sane/unindoctrinated person, I found the funeral propaganda around Queen Elizabeth II’s death and the Establishment’s rush to overwhelm critical thought with the rapid accession of ‘King’ Charles III to be infuriating and risible in equal measure. I am reminded of Picasso’s comment that after a walk in the countryside, he had ‘green’ indigestion and it had to be relieved with a green painting on return to his studio. So the steady stream of mind-numbingly stupid worshipful coverage became so indigestible that I needed to write a funeral poem. Almost coincident with this decision, the former Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy published her commemoration in the Guardian, ( Former poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy shares poem to mark Queen’s passing | Carol Ann Duffy | The Guardian )  which, unsurprisingly, turned out to be laugh out loud appalling – spoiler alert – it’s a list poem. (At this point I was going to quote a small sample but on re-reading it, the cringe is too great to
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