Unpacking Layers of Meta Irony
Unlike most of the subjects discussed in these essays, "The Mad Poet" is not readily available for those who have not read it. Therefore, I have included it here. Scroll to the bottom to read the poem in its entirety.
To this American reader, “The Mad Poet” by Micheal Longley was a tricky piece to make sense of. The poem is intensely tied to a specific manner of speech, and thereby to a region, culture, and class of person. The poem purports to act as advice to the reader, telling them not to engage with a mad poet should they encounter one. Yet, this literal message immediately creates an irony, with the poem serving as a warning against itself. Describing a “mad poet” and advising the reader not to give such a person the time of day, the poem is written in an informal, off-kilter, and bizarre way, making extensive use of slang and incredibly odd and even vulgar metaphors such as a reference to “piss[ing] on [one’s] father’s ashes” (Longley, line 14) and comparing the subject to a “leech cleeking your skin” (Longley, line 19). To analyze “The Mad Poet” is, in essence, to ignore its own advice by taking seriously the “mad poet” who wrote it, who we will refer to as the narrator. This contradiction adds a meta element to the poem’s humor. It is unclear whether the narrator of “The Mad Poet” is unaware of his own hypocrisy, or whether the embedded hypocrisy is an intentional comment on the poem’s Irish “identity” and how it would likely be perceived by the wider literary sphere.
“The Mad Poet” begins by telling the reader not to “play tig with…the mad poet” (Longley, line 3), i.e., not to engage with a poet who writes bizarre poetry, who is “mad”. In the next stanza, the reader is advised that they should “sling him a deafie” if he “gulders” (shouts) his work at you (Longley, lines 7-8). By this point, it is already clear by the extensive use of informal slang and odd, occasionally inappropriate manner of speech—the mad poet is compared to those with jaundice, religious fundamentalists, and people afflicted with “itchy nirls” (an old-fashioned slang term for herpes)—that “The Mad Poet” itself is a humorous example of precisely the type of poetry that the “mad poet” it is describing might write. Continuing this humorous and certainly intentional lack of self-awareness, the poem questions why a mad poet would write at all, suggesting in the same stanza that he “pissed on his father’s ashes” (Longley, line 14), yet another vulgar, taboo turn of speech. Clearly “The Mad Poet” is not highbrow, nor is it attempting to be. To the contrary, the entire poem is a single act of humorous self-reference, making fun of the character of the mad poet through the medium of poetry that could very well have been written by the self-same individual whom it mocks. However, there is another important element to this: the use of informal Irish slang to code the poem as lowbrow and the poet as mad.
The narrator of “The Mad Poet” is a stereotype of a vulgar, likely low-class Irishman. While anyone could write a bizarre and lowbrow poem such as this, the extensive use of Irish slang throughout means that this particular work can only be read in an Irish accent, can only be grounded in an Irish context. In a sense, it seems to be an exaggerated, satirical depiction of Irish stereotypes as perceived by foreigners, particularly English colonizers of Ireland. The image of the brash, drunken Irishman without respect for “civilized” social mores (presumably it can safely be asserted that the highbrow poetry favored by upper class Englishman would avoid this use of informal language and references to STDs and pissing in funeral urns) is actualized in “The Mad Poet”. In effect, could the poem’s own warning against engaging with it be intended for traditionalist literary critics who may not take kindly to the mad poetry? Could the narrator of the poem possess tongue-in-cheek self awareness of their own proclivities, and be preemptively shooing away those who would dress them down for their “uncivilized” Irish persona?
While Michael Longley himself seems to be very intentional in his use of cultural stereotypes and the poem’s internal self-contradiction, the intentions and thoughts of the fictional narrator are trickier to make definitive claims about. It could be argued that the narrator is the butt of the joke, comically oblivious to his own madness, but it seems perhaps more compelling to imagine the narrator as one wholly aware of how he will be perceived, and intentionally affecting an aura of mock-obliviousness to his own hypocrisy—his warnings against engaging critically with his own work an intentional message to literary critics who might denigrate the poem’s informal tone and mock the narrator for his failure to meet the standards of refinement and civilization set by English high society.
While the intentions and thoughts of the narrator of “The Mad Poet” are unclear, there is certainly a compelling case to be made for a kind of self-aware narrator intentionally constructing the meta elements of his text and commenting on his own perceived vulgarity. At first blush, the narrator of the poem appears to be lacking in self-awareness or intentional irony, but making a literal pitch to ignore those “mad” poets (like him). A deeper read, however, reveals a strong case for an intentionally constructed persona, a calculated lean into Irish stereotypes, and a narrator who is fully aware of his own appearances and using them to poke fun at the people who would take his poem at face value. Why else would the narrator choose to convey such a message in verse with standard (if unusually crass) poetic metaphor and structure? Regardless of the narrator’s true intentions, the poem is an excellent example of meta humor which remains firmly grounded in a specific setting through its use of Irish culture and slang.
Work Cited
Longley, Michael. "The Mad Poet", The Ghost Orchid. London: Cape Poetry, 1995.
"The Mad Poet"
by Michael Longley
When someone's afflicted with the itchy nirls
Or jaundice or religious fundamentalism,
You don't play tig with him: ditto the mad poet,
Head in the air, burping pomes, dootering about
And if, like a wildfowler gawking at blackbirds,
He cope-carlies into a waterhole or heugh
And gulders 'Hi! dear readers! Help!'— do not
Swing him a life-line: sling him a deafie instead
How do you know he isn't cowping accident-
ally on purpose (and likes it down there) just as
That head-the-ball Empedocles a header took
— In hot pursuit of immortality — into Etna?
It's still not clear what hurts him into verse, whether
He pissed on his father's ashes (in the urn) or
Thrappled his muse: at all events he is horn-daft
Like a bear bending the bars of his limitations
His mad-dog shite has everyone — the poetry-buffs
And the iggerant — shit-scared: he grabbles you, then
He read you to death, a leech cleeking your skin
Who won't drop off until he is boke-full of blood