Art O’Connor is a writer and manager of The Whistleblower. The Ditch and The Whistleblower held an event last Saturday, featuring a Ditch live podcast with photojournalist Eman Mohammed and conversation with author Eoin Higgins.
Marching through Stephen’s Green, rolling a cigarette, buttering an apple, whistling a tune, thinking about life, thinking about death, thinking about the complex inner mobility of longing, thinking about the treacherous dimension of time, thinking about March. Thinking about how beautiful March is, wavering at the threshold between winter and spring, between shit Irish weather and marginally less shit Irish weather.
Thinking about Hart Crane’s poem March – thinking about how it celebrates not the triumphant arrival of spring, but the fragile unravelling of winter. Thinking about how the poem continually violates the grammar of expectation, both in concept and execution – most exquisitely here:
and when the sun taps steeples
their glistenings dwindle
upward …
Thinking about the vertical axis in poetry – that old Romantic ladder leading down to secret knowledge – thinking about how Crane refashions it mid-descent, through an incongruous combination of trochees (“… dwindle / upward. . .”) into something fleet & elusive, evaporating in its own ellipsis. . .
Thinking about how March evaporates in its own ellipsis, thinking about how spring arrives, like love, in whispers, hints, little stirrings well below the threshold of articulation – and...
Viral posts circulating online alleged that Kasim Khan, son of former prime minister Imran Khan, called for Pakistan’s Generalised Scheme of Preferences Plus (GSP+) status to be revoked during a U...