A terrifying adolescent experience fuelled Irish Poet Daniel Skidd
to travel the world looking for an explanation as to what he'd
see. So why, asks Michael Baggs, did he end up in  Wales?

With the new millennium ploughing onward, and a media over-
load like never before, its easy to overlook more traditional forms
of art and entertainment.  Is there a place for poetry in our tech-
nological world?. Irish Poet Daniel Skidd thinks so.  He has fully
embraced the www phenomenom and combined his own poetry
web site with tales of the occult, aliens and the politics of Noth-
ern Ireland.  He's traveled the world to gather inspiration and has
now settled in Wales. So what was it about damp Wales that cou-
ld draw a well travelled writer.

"A lot of my poetry has been displayed here, so it feels like home"
he explains. "And a lot of my work was written in Wales and about
Wales, like my poem  Its the Pits, which is about the first man to go
to work in the Cymmer Valley. I find the valley very inspiring" 

Skidd, who has bi-polar affective diorder, a form of manic depress-
ion, spent two years living in Spain and says appearing at The Irish
Affair, a bar in Torremolinos gave him a valuable insight into the dif-
ference in attitudes and tastes of people from different parts of the
world.  He soon learned how to win over these audiences and how to
tailor his readings to each countries tastes.

"Once a Scottish man paid me £50 for just two Tapes" he says. "I coul-
d'nt believe it. The scots are definitely the most generous people, and
with their fiery nature I can be reciting 20 or more poems and they'll
still want more, whereas the Irish are happy with five or six which
they can sit back and think about". He says the Americians have
"really over the top tastes" and are particularly enthusiastic about the
poetry he writes about the occult

He recalls an "over the top" appearance he made on Spainish-Amer-
ican TV "I just wanted to shake up all the rich people out there wat=
ching, but I ended up scaring the presenter" he laughs.

Much of Skidd's work on the occult is grim nad darkfeeling which
are made stronger when he recounts a truly chilling tale, which expla-
ins where the interest started.

"When I was 15 and still living at home with my parents in Ireland. I
came home late one summer night and made my way to bed.  There
was no key to my room so I could'nt lock the door.  I woke up a while
later and my bedroom was freezing cold.  I looked up and there was
someone standing in my bedroom..  I was terrified".  He's first thought
was that someone had broken in, choosing his room because it was 
the only one un-locked.  "He didn't do anything, or even move and I 
began to think that it was my father , and that he was drunk.  But it 
wasn't," he shudders.  "The thing was over eight-feet tall."

Coming from a strict Catholic background, Skidd had always been
taught that the answer to this sort of experience was to pray.  Which he did.

"It didn't make any difference, and the thing stayed with me for nearly five
hours, only disappearing with dawn.  I got up and told my family, but re-
fused to ever sleep in there again."  Soon after that he left for England. "My
father explained my sudden departure and tales of demons and monsters 
as me having had some sort of breakdown" he says.

The experience sparked Skidd's interest in the occult and all things super-
natural, and in his early twenties began studying in the hope of finding an 
explanation to what he had seen as a teenager.

"There is one reccurring idea that I believe in " he says.  "And that's that ghosts
are natures video recordings.  When people see ghosts, its just nature replaying
the past.  But what I saw wasn't a ghost."

Despite the vow never to sleep in his family home again, many years later he 
found himself back there living with his wife, and father. "One morning, my
father came downstairs and told us that the previous night he'd been reading
in bed, and when he looked up the same eight-foot tall creature was stood in 
his room.  He said it did'nt do anything again, but this time it walked through
the wall and disappeared.

"Three days later, I found my father dead in bed.  But at the funeral, his friends
and colleagues were coming up and telling me that, before he died, he told
everyone what he'd seen, and that when he told them all years before that I'd
had a breakdown, he had been wrong."

Skidd says that because so many people now live in cities, these expeiences
are rare.  "If anyone came out here to Wales, I could almost guarantee they'd
experience something of the supernatural or the occult" he says.

Despite the intrigue and suspense Skidd's work generates, one can't help wonder-
ing, with poetry almost a rarity in todays culture, how a modern poet can ever reach
the heights of the literary greats.

"People have asked me if I think I'm better than Wordsworth, Keats or Shelly, but
how could I answer that ?" he responds.  " The scene they were writing in was so 
much more open to things outside reality.  I think the role of the poet these days is 
very different to what it was in their time, as well.  I see my role as being to put out
protests through poems and warning people about the dangers of globalisation. 
Everthing else is so upfront these days, like romance.  I don't feel like romanticising
things like that because it's all on TV and the like for people to see."  He says that
even some of his comedic poems have messages of protest.  "Its easier to warn people
by giving it to them in a nice story" he says.

When Skidd recites his poetry it's not just a reading - it's more a performance.  His
Irish accent frames his words perfectly, and his work needs to be heard to be fully
appreciated.  He has a great sense of rhythm and it comes as no suprise to discover
he's also written lyrics for hip hop and soul music.  His more humorous work is also
filled with cleverly disguised hidden meaning, proof that modern poetry does not
need to be abstract and without rhythm to be relevant.  It's a suprising wake-up call
to find something so seemingly old-fashioned both enteraining and amusing, but
much of that is probably down to Skidd's enthusiasm and sense of humor.  So does
he see himself as much a performer as a poet?

"Well, no one could surpass me on reciting my own work - they are my words, " he
jokes. "My father used to make me study Shakespeare and I hated it. I'm not inter-
ested in acting, I'd rather live my own life than act another and I could only perform
my own words anyway."

He has high hopes for the future.  With the relaunch of his web-site and new tapes
of his poetry available to buy, Skidd is hoping to reach more people across the 
globe this year.

"I want to be the greatest poet of our time," he says, but he needs help to get there.
"I was offered a book deal in Ireland, but I'd only get a tiny fraction of the money, 
I'd rather do it for myself.  A lot of people have told me I'll be rich after I'm dead. I'd
certainly like to be famous, but the money doesn't come into it."

Tapes of his work are available priced €5/$7 for further deatails contact him
at donskidd@yahoo.ie.


.(Article from the Big Issue  January 2003)