Grady O'Corn

<-- Some Musings

For years it has been the bane of Ireland that despite it’s green fields, renowned whiskey, and abundant leprechaun, the tiny Island which lies off the coast of its great friend and paternal-figure, England, had yet to produce a single literary figure of note. Now, it looks as if things may be changing for the better in this year of our Lord, 2008, with the discovery of the lost works of a little known bard called Grady O’Corn. It appears now that while the vulgar masses of his contemporary Irish were reading comic strips, simple provincial children’s stories (“The Dubliners”, by J. Joice) and the ruddy but unsubtle limericks of Yeats, there was a man—a great man—whose devotion to sophisticated literature and what he began to call “Symbolism” was falling on deaf ears, deaf mind, and whatever other deaf parts of the anatomy are required to neither read nor comprehend.

Relatively little is know of O’Corn’s early life. What is known is that he was orphaned moments after he was born. His mother had suddenly gone into labor at a place where two country roads met. The father had assisted and it is said he did so with steady hands and a complete confidence that things would turn out alright. The birth indeed came of splendidly but a cart came speeding down the road in the opposite direction that his parents were facing. Quoth O’Corn late in life in his only known comments on that day, “I could see it coming and I tried to yell out ‘watch out, watch out, a cart be approachin’ from behind you!’ but I was just too young”. He was adopted by the cart-owner and given the single moniker “O’Grhadeekairn”. As his literary ambitions grew, he changed his name to Grady O’Corn because “you can’t get famous as O’Grhadeekairn, you just can’t” and because O’Grhadeekairn “isn’t even a name, it’s just mock Gaelic doggerel”. The few living witnesses to the bard’s early life whom we at LBS were able to interview all agree on two things: 1) O’Grhadeekairn did not speak his first word until he was a full eight years of age, and 2) he could sing at age four.

His middle years were the years filled with that lust for language that we can now discern in his poems. From his early attempts that were overly marked with vulgarities (“I’m in my c*nt period / pun perhaps intended / I love a good swear in print / and watching girls get rear-ended”, O’Corn developed rather rapidly into a sophisticated poet of nuance. Ironically, though, nuance was not what the Dublin public craved and he never made a cent off a poem. Occasional outbursts appear sporadically amidst even his mature work. In particular, one little fragment that has been recovered rails against the Dublin public in vulgar, almost sexual terms: “like a man pent up for months / then finally given release / my meanings were aimin’ for her chest / but ended up up in the trees”.

During the latter years of his life O’Corn was forced to take on odd jobs that wounded the poet’s great pride. However, he faced the cold winds of fate and the torrents of minimum wage labor with an acerbic humor, once quipping that he was living on “the shit side of an allegory” and insisting that there was another and much more meaningful significance in his relegation to the sidelines of the canons of literature. No one was sitting next to him at the bar when he made that quip, but O’Corn dutifully wrote it down on a napkin and wired it to a contact at the daily paper. When O’Corn finally passed away violently in his sleep at the age of 106 in New York City (far from his beloved homeland) there were, against all odds, people at his funeral. Now, perhaps, with the surfacing of some of his dense and enigmatic masterpieces he will actually be remembered by those people—the employees of Neidhart’s Funeral Home—as more than just another body to feed into the crematory flames… but as a body of work.

Now the leprechaun are gone forever, victims of a neglected environment in the myopic economic rise of the Celtic Tiger. But in their place—are these—the once lost works of the First poet of Ireland: