Tuesday 13 August 2013

Inconvenience: A History

My poem Inconvenience: A History is just published in Fightback: The Journal of The International Marxist Tendency in Ireland.

It is accompanied by an interesting introduction by Seamus Loughlin:

Galway Poet Kevin Higgins wrote this poem in solidarity with the Dublin Bus Workers. In our view it makes some very telling points about the attitude of the Irish Bourgeois, who would rather propagandise about the “inconvenience” of the strike for passengers than address the grievance of trade union members.  For the great and the good of course, economic issues and the problems faced by ordinary workers are merely by the by, a side effect of the struggle for profit and gain. Of course this isn’t a recent development as Kevin observes. We wonder how those unfortunate factory owners and slum landlords coped in 1916 what with the GPO being under occupation by the Citizen’s Army and the Volunteers, how could they collect their dividends?”

I've actively been trying of late to get poems published in not just the usual poetry venues, to get my poems, or at least some of them, out of the literary salon, if you will, so that they might be read by those who don't usually read contemporary poetry. This is just the latest poem with which I've done this.