Aidan Andrew Dun: News

Yes Poetry Lovers,

This is the new blogging Aidan, adding footnotes to footsteps as I continue to travel lightly/darkly toward Intelligent Playground in KX.

Just the other day I ran my 'Shelley's Guitar' workshop in a fab Art Nouveau tower in greenest Dorset with a handful of superkool teenagers all open to looking at the interface between orthodox poetics and modern songwriting/rap; to think (and write) about the necessary mix between Dionysian and Apollonian impulses in the artistic furnace.

After anecdotes, discussion and speculation, we ended up with a few sheets of good lines and finally got to chanting these lyrics to backing-tracks and guitar grooves. (Some peeps brought instruments with.) That day we all travelled a long distance, worked ourselves hard on a gritty road. (Big boost to all who were up for the journey, kool runnin's everyone!)

The poem which follows was written the day after the session when I climbed a sunny hill solo and found myself gazing at a herd of dairy cows ranged in a semicircle round me. After a while of keeping still to observe I suddenly realized a strange parallel existed between these four-footed guys in their sunny pasture and the workshop-crew of the previous day - all sprawled on floor-cushions and staring (at first) with nervous interest at the wild figure of an urban poet in their midst, talking like no teacher...

Here's the poem ...




Apollonian Workshop



A semicircle of dumb herd-animals
drooling transparent stuff from chins,
perpetually-chewing, American-style:
reminiscent this morning of other beasts,
yesterday’s fiercer pack of hungover
sixteen-year-old wolves: teenagers,
sleepy, yawning, sceptical, ill-at-ease
under troubled skin, trapped behind
practiced expressions of indifference,
mirror-perfected masks of boredom,
impenetrable walls, generation-gaps,
all the old defences of the innocent.


Ranged also in a crescent like these -
probing vast pink nostrils with tongues -
grumpy, lazing on scattered cushions,
they waited, steaming with impatience,
probably frogmarched to the ordeal,
barked-at in some off-limits bedroom
usually barricaded with audio;
told by the authorities to attend,
ordered for their own good where
culture reaches out to new victims,
boring the tits off everyone.


One particular wolf in bovine clothing,
no poser, on Union Jack floor-cushion
sprawled in scruffy chic, bedhead
carefully pomaded to simulate
the passing of a hurricane across the skull,
growled a greeting almost as guttural
as last-night’s phone-call to Australia
via the porcelain connection,
the cables of spaghetti bolognaise
drooling from the chin with lactic acid:
that regurgitation of the small hours.
Another eyed his potential torturer
as some kind of undercover pedagogue
smuggled into the Easter hols
in a last-ditch parental bid
to kick dyslexic offspring into line.


Then a zither began to sound
from the old days of the citharode;
and cloud-shadows began to slide
across an unfamiliar countryside.
Then rivers began to foam with black
milk from the breasts of a she-wolf
as forty singers sang the circle-ode.
Until the crescent closed suddenly
as shivering voltages changed the world.
And nostrils of the wild beasts flared
as into the distance feral eyes stared,
looking out of time and space
into the mountain-ranges of the god Apollo.

MCCOOL is the narrative of a painful triangular love-affair. At point one of the triangle is the extraordinary Galatea James, married to Colonel Parker James. At the third point of the triangle is Tyg McCool, brilliant, celebrated and decadent Scottish war-painter. MCCOOL is a thorny intricate love story, but the work also has a military theme, reflecting contemporary atmospheres, luxurious Western lifestyles silhouetted against apocalyptic times.

Gala and Parker James have been married about eight years. Their marriage is childless. In Chapter One he’s suddenly deployed to the Middle East and Gala, anxious, lonely in Dorset, encouraged by her friend Elaane, rents a flat in London, takes up her old career as art-journalist. In Chap Two her path will cross that of the war-painter McCool.

Yet the betrayal is not at all straightforward. Gala, attracted to McCool, will very slowly begin to admit this to herself. But she’s truly alarmed as well as amazed by his graphic treatments of war which of course fuel her anxiety about her husband. McCool meanwhile, quite macho himself, though in a different way to Colonel Parker James, has fallen big-time for Galatea. Uncharacteristically obsessed, now no longer under the spell of his cruel military muse, he stops painting bleeding-edge hitech desert battlescenes, and begins to dream of portraying this woman. Of course this turns her on but it ramps up the guilt at the same time. She’s married to a man whose life is on the line. Their marriage may be halfway on the rocks – she’s always wanted children, he suffers post-traumatic shock from the Balkans – but still, Gala is loyal and very fond of her husband.


AAD reads from MCCOOL on 3rd February 2010 at the launch of the verse-novel (at The German Gymnasium, 26 Pancras Rd, London N1C 4TB) 6.30 pm.


(MCCOOL in cyberspace: on the Links page you can the virtual prospectus for MCCOOL, four of the verse-novel's 264 sonnets laid out in page-turning-land.)

The swans on the splashpage were captured at the source of the Fleet by the Jamaican photographer, Ron Vester.

The images of St Pancras Old Church and of the Thomas Hardy Tree are by the Italian photographer, Francesco Guidicini.

The double-portrait of AAD (in mylar) is the work of the celebrated New York poet and photographer Ira Cohen.