Anti-Laureate of the People's Republic of Cork

2012-01-13T13:22:00.005Z

http://www.sujikwockkim.com/

Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize Results

There were over 1700 poems entered this year and judging the competition was a very educational experience. One thing which quickly occurred to me is that not every good poem is a good “competition poem”. I thought of many books of poems I enjoy – collections by Charles Simic, Billy Collins, Sharon Olds etc. where the fineness of many individual poems is brought out by the close proximity of its siblings; by the way it fits with a poet’s overall oeuvre and is consistent with the poet’s voice. But such fine poems often are not outstanding, they are not the type of poem which qualifies for anthology selection or will impress the casual or non-reader of poetry on the page of a general newspaper. No, the winning “competition poem” is altogether a different beast, a stand-alone achievement which punches above its weight, a corvette which bristles with the armament of a battleship.

Reading poem after poem in a batch of 1700, many otherwise worthy poems failed to impress. A certain de rigueur musical rhythm was monotonous in poem after poem. Many restrained treatments on well-worn themes (Irish landscape being one which springs to mind) failed to distinguish themselves in a field which included so many such treatments.

Many other poems fumbled the ball close to the goal, starting well and progressing well until reaching an unintentional bathetic declaration or sounding a discordant musical note.

In the end, the top thirteen poems distinguished themselves in different ways. Of the 1700 poems the winning poem really stood out for me, while there was some difficulty in deciding which poems to include in the “highly commended” list and which bubbled just below the surface. I decided to publish a list of 70 commended poems, wishing to reassure many entrants of their achievement while risking angering many others who did not make it through to the top 80. To those people all I can say is that the poems were judged anonymously, read by me with no author’s name attached and no personal slight was intended.

The winning poem, Suji Kwock Kim’s (USA) ‘Sonogram Song’, won me over by being highly imagistic and argumentative at the same time. There are very few poems which can sustain philosophical speculation amid such effective evocation of sensory perception without going awry. Another marvellous technical achievement in this poem is its use of diction, very few Latinate words except for a couple of medical terms – all of the unusual words here are Germanic in origin and their rough music, syllable by syllable, magically contributes to a euphony which would have been cacophonous in the hands of a less deft poet. And that’s all before we absorb the subject matter – an account of love whose subject is fragile and potentially vulnerable to horrific loss. I’ve read a few sonogram or ultrasound poems in my day but none push the envelope as far as this one has done.

The poem which I placed second was Alinda Wasner’s (USA) ‘Ode to the Night and in the Morning Following an All-Day Day of Arguing’ . It’s a list poem with a refrain of “Rejoice for”. It was in part reminiscent of Adam Zagajewski’s ‘In Praise of the Mutilated World’ and that reminiscence initially worked against it. But overall, structurally and diction-wise it is quite a different poem; also tonally different from Zagajewski but just as life affirming, just as likely to ring in the mind’s ear after the page is turned, the eye has closed.

Third place went to Tom Moore’s (Ireland) ‘Meteorites’. This is a far more structurally conventional poem than the preceding two but manages to pack substantial detail in imagery and subject matter into four tight quatrains. Ostensibly it is about observing a cosmological phenomenon in a domestic setting but it is also about the process of human thought, about the productive distractions of an inquiring mind and its capacity to draw comparisons between disparate entities – the very process involved in the composition of a good poem.

Now, on to the highly-commended poems in alphabetical order of the poets’ names.

Erica Fabri’s (USA) ‘Fish’ appeals to the Surrealist fan in me – it’s a very simple effective poem with a well-worked for, well-earned punchline – which means the poem’s merits do not depend on the punchline alone.

‘Mitterand’s Last Meal’ by Judith Krause (Canada) is another successful list poem with wonderful rhythm and diction. It also appeals to the political animal in me.

Judith Neale’s (Canada) ‘Blue Bowl’ is an affecting love poem without bathos or discordant music, without any of the time-worn clichés of love-speak.

Tanya Olson’s (USA) “Slave to the Virgin” is a poem with overt Irish subject matter – a biographical treatment of Matt Talbot which deftly balances the voice of an omniscient narrator with the fictional personal voice of Talbot speaking himself.

Lynn Robert’s (UK) ‘Le Douannier Rousseau: Surprised! National Gallery London’ isn’t, as the title might suggest, an example of ekphrasis but a narrative, recounting the painting’s composition, in language which flows very effectively and affectingly.

Mark Ryan’s (Ireland) ‘Breakfast with Yeat’s’ is a very funny parody of Yeat’s quite serious “He Wishes for the Clothes of Heaven” which would bring a happy smile to my face any morning.

Padraig Rooney’s (Ireland) “The Names of the Winds” celebrates love and lore together. It treats the importance of legends in our culture and how they can, with all their socially weighted value, impinge for better or worse on our thoughts during an intimate moment. The way Rooney moves sand in this poem is like the way Joyce moves snow in “The Dead” and the poem also shares an elegiac tone with that totemic example of Irish literature.

John Whitworth’s (UK) “First Sight” is another wonderfully humorous poem. It relates a man’s admiration for a woman he views through a video blog (a vlog to those less of an old fogie than I am) somehow without managing to be sleazy or exploitative.

Amber West’s (USA) ‘Daughter Eraser’ once again appealed to my Surrealist tastes and successfully illustrates the opinion that the truth is often better conveyed through aspects of myth rather than factual reportage.

Alexandra Zempiloglou’s (Greece) “I lost me child” is naive in the painterly meaning of the term, illustrating core human emotions in apparently guileless, simple language which sings with its refrain.

I was genuinely surprised to discover how weighted the results were in favour of women. In the top thirteen there are nine women and five men. Five Americans, Three Irish, Two Canadians, Two English and one Greek.

The 1700 poems were submitted by 567 poets. The countries which supplied the most entrants were Ireland (204) the USA (170) the UK (96) Canada (20) Australia (15) France (13) India (9). The remainder were made up by a motley selection of non-Anglophone countries. Mysteriously, there were no entries from New Zealand or South Africa.

Must Do, Will Do

2011-12-08T19:30:00.007Z

I’m judging the O’ Donoghue Poetry Competition at the moment. I’m charged with choosing 13 prizewinning poems from between one and two thousand poems entered. I’ve read about 500 poems now and already I’ve found at least a dozen great poems. What’s disconcerting is that there will possibly be over a thousand more entries to read, at least another couple of dozen great poems will emerge from that pile. I will be left with 30-40 great poems and can choose only one first prize winner and twelve other prizewinners.

Aside from these great poems I expect there will be at least one or two hundred others deserving of periodical publication - even if they’re not quite capable of impressing me more than the first 30-40. No poetry competition lists a couple of hundred honourable mentions. It’s disconcerting to know in advance that the authors of many fine and accomplished poems will not get to know I liked their work. But that’s the nature of the game. I’ve been runner-up a couple of times for poetry book and manuscript competitions but I’ve never come anywhere in a single poem competition. As I do the necessary cull of the poems not getting into the final 13 I think to myself “So this is what has happened to every poem I’ve ever entered in a competition”. One side of me is ruthless in its decision-making, the other side is filled with empathy.

At least people can rest assured that unlike the situation with many other competitions all the profits raised by entry fees in the O’Donoghue award will go in payments to writers, writers who win prizes in the competition, writers who will be published in Southword and some writers invited to the Cork Spring Poetry Festival. The only other expenses are the money we spend on advertising the competition.

All of us at the Munster Literature Centre are so grateful to the entrants for parting with their money for the benefit of our registered charity.

Normally there is a fee for the judge of the competition, but one of the reasons I’m judging it this year is because the Munster Literature Centre needs to divert the usual judge’s fee to the budget for the Cork Spring Poetry Festival. I’m determined that the judge should change each year. Last year’s judge Leanne O’Sullivan is in the middle of editing the poetry section for four full issues of Southword and won’t be replaced as editor until after next Summer. The next paid judge of the competition will be the poet who succeeds Leanne as Southword’s poetry editor.

In the meantime I’m maintaining my patience until the last entry is in before checking out the authorship of the great poems which have reached me minus their author’s names. As the expression goes “I can’t wait to find out who they are”, but actually, I must do and will do.

Poetry & Elitism

2011-04-15T12:04:00.005+01:00

If the way to poetry is blocked to you by an elite that elite and you are one and the same.

What is poetry? To a seasoned reader of contemporary poetry it’s very much a case of “I know it when I see it” which is a very unsatisfactory answer to a non-seasoned poetry reader. A seasoned poetry reader is to me someone who reads poetry every day. If their means of making a living allows, a seasoned poetry reader reads poems several times a day every day in the same way that someone who dedicates himself to God prays several times a day. This also corresponds to the pattern of activity of a seasoned television watcher, a seasoned web consumer, a seasoned gourmand.

If a definition of poetry could be summed up in a pat formula, anybody, anywhere, anytime could write poetry. But anybody can’t do this. In fact nobody can do it anytime anywhere all the time. Of course it is also absurd to suggest poetry must be written all the time just for seasoned poetry readers – and it isn’t. But neither can a poem be written with integrity specifically to please a reader who does not generally read poetry. Such people regularly assert that poetry is elitist¸ by which they mean that it is closed off to most people at the power or behest of an elect few.

Yet poetry is accessible everywhere, it can be bought for a few cents at second-hand book stores, found in decent quantities in every public library and now proliferates in its good and bad manifestations on the internet. But of course when people say poetry is closed off and not accessible they don’t mean that one’s way is blocked to it by physical or financial obstacles, they mean that it’s meaning or the means by which its emotional and intellectual content can be digested is blocked. “Blocked by what?” one might ask. Blocked by convention is the simple and honest answer. Poetry is a living, evolving art form, much like television drama.

The conventions of narrative story-telling on television, the rules by which a television drama may be ordered, by which I mean – how the drama is constructed scene by scene, the techniques by which character may be developed and presented etc., are evolving all the time. Take an episode of a contemporary American Cop show and compare it with an episode of Ironside from the 60s or Hawaii Five O from the 70s and you will see that you have a very different kind of beast from the earlier shows. In the contemporary show there is much quicker transitioning between scenes – quicker-editing – an influence of music videos; greater use of flashback, more allusions to popular culture and much more which makes it different from the earlier shows. Television audiences are not disturbed by this because they have grown daily with the gradual evolution and changing of conventions of television drama over the years. But, if you timewarped a 1960s tv audience to the present and sat them down in front of a contemporary TV drama they would find it difficult to understand, even enjoy because the conventions of storytelling would be so much changed to them.

Much the same is going on in poetry. Because most poetry from bygone ages is closer to the form of popular song than most contemporary poetry, most people find it more ‘accessible’ and less ‘elitist’ than contemporary poetry. Most people have studied song-like poetry in school and are well-schooled in its conventions. But because they haven’t followed the evolution of poetry over the past few decades (or even century), because they are not regular readers of poetry the conventions are a mystery to them. It is not an elite which blocks the way to poetry, it is the preferred way of spending their time for the masses. Anybody can appreciate a fine contemporary poem if they cared to take the time to read poetry regularly and familiarise themselves with its conventions like they have done with television drama (and reading a poem takes a lot less time than a 40 minute tv episode). If the television drama analogy does not work for you there are plenty others such as sport. Who can properly enjoy the games of Cricket or Baseball without knowing what their rules and conventions are?

Nobody is blocking your way to discovering what those rules and conventions are except yourself.

If the way to poetry is blocked to you by an elite that elite and you are one and the same.

Kevin Kiely, Literary Assassin

2011-03-31T15:13:00.008+01:00

Reviewing and being reviewed sometimes gets hilarious for the third-hand bystander; not is it always so amusing for those in the thick of it. A reviewer can’t like every book presented to them and often needs to let it be known. Dennis O’Driscoll, poet, critic and frequent book reviewer stopped reviewing Irish poetry books decades ago after one of the nation’s senior poets took him aside on a social occasion and queried: “What did I ever do to you?” O’Driscoll mused “It never occurred to him that I simply didn’t like his book.”

Two great literary spats are raging this week. Eileen Battersby’s Irish Times review of Dermot Healy’s latest novel has drawn fire from novelist Eugene McCabe in a letter to the editor which in turn has attracted the censure of another letter by John Banville. On the web a self-published English woman has amused the world through what is being described as a “meltdown” in reaction to a review she received online. David Barnett touches on them both in his Guardian blog here

Therefore, in the week that’s in it, I think it is time for Book Ireland’s occasional poetry reviewer, Kevin Kiely to receive some of the fame and attention he clearly deserves. One doesn’t need to visit Kevin Kiely’s website http://www.kevinkiely.com/ to learn he has never been published by either Bloodaxe or the Gallery Press, his gratuitous sideswipe at those presses’ commissioning editors/poets in his latest Books Ireland article is evidence enough for that.

In discussing the Salmon anthology Dogs Singing he writes: “Every poet here is brought to their knees hugging their doggies in a verse anthology as infectious as your dog(s). Despite weak efforts from Neil Astley and Peter Fallon you get a kennel full.” I’ll pass quietly over the crimes against grammar here. Doubtless Mr. Kiely discovered other efforts he deemed weak in this 300 page tome, but his singling out Mr. Astley and Mr. Fallon like this succinctly bewrays Mr. Kiely’s usual blatant motivation for writing a book review: sticking the knife in.

His reviews are so infamously negative and gratuitously abusive that they really deserve to be better known. Mr Kiely’s reviews of poetry books are to reviewing what William McMonagal’s dirges on the Tay Bridge are to epic poetry.

In reviewing Tom Matthews’, witty, amusing collection The Owl and the Pussycat Kiely says: “However, these collected beer-mat jottings are ideal reading in the pub but perhaps should end up on the floor with the night’s sweepings?” (Is there another person alive with four university degrees associated with the English language capable of writing such a travesty of a sentence?)

Kiely not only doesn’t know the difference between good poetry and bad, he doesn’t know the difference between a literary critic and a hack reviewer. He describes himself as a poet, novelist, playwright and literary critic on his website, yet there is no evidence whatsoever to back up his claim to be a literary critic. Certainly the kind of blather he writes would never grace the pages of the LRB or the TLS. Can you imagine Anne Carson or even Charles Simic lowering themselves to this level of schoolboy diatribe?

In his round-up of poetry collections in the current Books Ireland debutants Paul Jeffcut and Orfhlaith Foyle get savaged along with Irish luminaries such as Rita Ann Higgins and Kerry Hardie. In the interest of disclosure I should say that Kiely was unimpressed with my last book Making Music in what was the first review in his current Books Ireland stint. Initially upset, by the time I had read the put-downs he had prepared for the other books in the same article, including one by a heroine of mine, Paula Meehan, I was breaking my sides laughing. Any excerpts I could quote here simply could not do Kiely justice; his diatribes need to be read whole to appreciate their full, egregious badness.

Kiely does not savage everyone; last year, in a particular round-up, his juvenile embitterment was put on hold when reviewing Gerald Dawe (instrumental in Kiely receiving one or more of his many writing degrees), Eilean Ní Chuilleanáin (whom Kiely quotes saying something favourable about his own poetry on his own website) and Chris Agee (who is the influential editor of Irish Pages and the new Salt Irish poetry list).

The locution glass houses comes to mind when reading the sample of verse Kiely puts up on his web to represent himself: http://www.kevinkiely.com/poetry.html (scroll to end of page, as you scroll take note of the book title Plainchant for a Sundering – good enough for a Tony Hancock sketch)

Kiely seems so determined here to avoid what he sees as the verbal excesses of others that his own language is totally devoid of colour and if his articles are juvenile, this poem’s thought process displays his jejune cast of mind.

Every now and again an outstanding reviewer deserves to have his reviews reviewed, especially when they’re outstandingly bad. I’m only surprised that in this instance I appear to be the first to treat Kevin Kiely.

I'm giving up irony for Lent

2011-03-24T02:43:00.009Z

The Frustrations of Minor Capitalists No. 3 She sported tattoos of Christ’s wounds. On the beach while she sunbathed strangers would stick their fingers in her side. Others, tears rolling would break down in prayer. When buying cigarettes from corner stores, shop girls, mouths open, would place her change in a considerate circle around the ersatz stigmata of her palms. Shamans called on her to join them in leading seminars, community leaders asked her to speak to dissolute youth, television producers invited her onto afternoon chat shows but she refused them all with a smirk... much to the chagrin of Prince’s Street Skin Decor Ltd. who really, really badly needed the artistic credit and the free marketing.

The Comforting Pleasures of Sadness

2011-03-06T16:07:00.006Z

'The Comforting Pleasures of Sadness' has been an unlucky poem. It was to be the title poem to a full-length collection which Salmon accepted in 1990 but never came out. It was also a key part of a selection of poems of mine which RTE accepted to broadcast on their Thought for the Day radio slot which then went out just before the 8am news, when the whole country was tuned in. But between the poems being accepted and recorded for broadcast Brian Linehan Sr., Fianna Fail candidate for President, was exposed as a liar and RTE dropped the whole project like the proverbial hot potato. The poem in its use of metaphor to make political comment was heavily influenced by the mythologising work of Zbigniew Herbert, Miroslav Holub and Marin Sorescu. When almost twenty years later and my first full-length collection finally came out (I had a book from Raven in 1990 - a long narrative poem, which I don't count as my first proper book) the issues dealt with in 'The Comforting Pleasures of Sadness' seemed so distant from the realities of the Celtic Tiger period that even if they had been dealt with in a straight realist fashion they would still have seemed surreal and out of touch.
Sad to say our reality is becoming like this again:

THE COMFORTING PLEASURES OF SADNESS

The Minister lived like a perverse King Midas:
Everything he touched turned to lies:
"Policemen wave wands not truncheons.
They are fairygodparents to the unemployed.
In place of cars we give them melons.
In place of steeds we give them vermin.
The unemployed, like children, are our treasured possessions.
Their innocence in the face of adversity,
Their meekness before hardship instills
The More Fortunate with paternallike pleasures.
The jobless, like children, are our much beloved.
They bejewel us with simple pride in our situation.
They bestow on us granaries of gratitude,
Dowries of deliverance, vaults of vicissimutunk,"

The Minister's dark limousine was disguised
As a crystal carriage before the eyes of the people;
His axeswing was a smooth caress.
His drownings were presented as baptisms.
And so the lies were spun like a noose.

"Sadnesses do not exist and where they do
They are pleasurable, as pleasurable as
Darkness and loneliness, silence and bleeding."

On the health of the nation he intoned:
"Measles is administered to preserve traditional childhood.
Cancer is dispensed to the people to make their every day more valued."

His darkest abode was made to seem
White as wedding cake. His richest suit:
A holyman's vestments. His minions told the people:
"The Minister is so close to God
That in his house he has clouds
Instead of carpets."

"And we have seen him make
Cake out of words.In his eyes
He absorbs the sadnesses of the world.
Through his heart is pumped
Everyone's love of the earth."

Thus did The Comforting Pleasures Of Sadness
Come to be spun like a noose,
Unravelled like a wound.

S/Found Poem

2011-03-02T01:08:00.004Z

S/Found Poem

The healthy don’t know what they’re missing.
It seems like someone
is cracking a whip
inside my ears
each time I move my eyes
swiftly from side to side.
Tinnitus sways to some strange drums.
Not everyone gets to experience
this inervating oddity.
And, Richard Burton once
almost lost an eye
in a knifefight;
it hung by a thread.
You know, he said,
you can see
the most extraordinary
things with your eye
hanging half-way
down your face.

Photo by Symphen

Cork Spring Literary Festival 2011 Preview

2010-11-29T15:28:00.010Z

Click on the poster to read the pdf of the festival brochure (2.5mb), finished just today. Photos, bio notes, poems and more.

Two Novelists

Two Workshops

Two Book Launches

Three Films

Eight Participating Countries

Eight Readings

Twenty-Five Poets

Featuring: Pat Boran, Catch the Moon, Patrick Cotter, Ian Duhig, Kristiina Ehin, Alan Garvey, James Harpur, Tomas Lieske, Dave Lordan, Lory Manrique-Hyland, Maram al-Massri, Gerry Murphy, Ailbhe Ni Ghearbhuigh, Leanne O'Sullivan, Gabriel Rosenstock, Valerie Rouzeau, Silke Scheuermann, Catherine Smith, Matthew Sweeney, Julijana Velichkovska, William Wall, Ian Wild, Adam Wyeth, Zhao Lihong

http://www.patrickcotter.ie/CORRECT%20CSLF%2011%20brochure%20insert%20(1).pdf Link to timetable

Too School For Cool

2010-11-12T16:17:00.005Z

The recent sales success of Soundings is actually a reminder of its total failure as an educational instrument.

Walk into any bricks & mortar bookshop in the country this close to Christmas and among the tottering piles of volumes ready to collapse on top of you (besides the latest Katey Price biography or Scandanavian schlock crime yarn masquerading as edgy continental literature) is the reprint of Soundings - the 1960s "interim" syllabus anthology which lazily endured for over a quarter of a century ensuring that a couple of generations of Irish school children never heard of Seamus Heaney before he won the Nobel prize or knew that poems were written by Irish women. The anthology's selection ended with two early poems by Thomas Kinsella written in the 1950s. Except for these rather daring (compared with the rest of the book) short lyrics one could be forgiven for thinking modern Ireland was all about stony grey soils and the spraying of potatoes.

In fairness to Gus Martin, it wasn't his fault that the syllabus was not updated over the course of a quarter of a century. Eavan Boland was just getting started as the anthology was published and GM possibly thought he was being revolutionary including one living poet in the entire book.

This year as the publisher of the "Best of Irish Poetry" anthology series I have had to make the painful decision to cease its publication. The anthology had very low sales and received only one review in its four year history despite being the only attempt at establishing an annual publication of record for contemporary Irish poetry. Its American and British equivalents sell in the tens of thousands. This Irish series sold in the tens. Unsupported by the country's library system, never reviewed even in Poetry Ireland's quarterly or even its newsletter, the true interest and support for contemporary poetry in Ireland is rawly exposed.

The low sales figures of Best of Irish Poetry bewray how the frenzy surrounding Soundings has more to do with nostalgia than love of poetry, snapped up as it is by thousands of individuals who have never been motivated to seek out a poem by Eavan Boland or Matthew Sweeney, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain or Thomas McCarthy.

The broadsheets and broadcasters trumpet how the sales triumph of Soundings signals what a cultured poetry-loving mob our middle-brow, middle-class bookshop-frequenting bourgeois are. Actually they're more like the fool who calls himself a cineaste or movie-buff when he refuses to watch anything made after 1967 - that's putting it in language even they should understand.

I'm sorry, actually, I can't tell you that or how poems can get stolen

2010-11-03T14:56:00.006Z

I was having lunch today with Matthew Sweeney and Gerry Murphy in the Farmgate Cafe under their fabulous poetry wall (the great poetry wall of Cork). Last week as one of my dayjob duties I hosted a joint launch of their new books. The boys were so busy signing books for other people (over 90 books sold on the night) that they hadn't got around to exchanging books with each other, so today they finally did just that. Matthew has developed a taste for writing all his book inscriptions in German lately, a language Gerry cannot understand. I was there to assure Gerry that it was complimentary ("to a great friend and an excellent poet"). Gerry wrote "hugs and kisses" for Matthew. Yes, yes, gay in all senses of the word.

As is usual, the topics of conversation strayed far: gossip concerning an editor none of us likes; Neil Prendeville's miraculous discovery that Neurofen Plus works better than Viagra; good and bad literary festivals abroad etc. I can't remember how we got onto the subject of blindness - in spite of the old housewife's connection between that affliction and Prendeville's public past-times. Matthew suddenly said "They've discovered how to make blind people see".

So I asked, do you mean by attaching a piece of technology to the optic nerve?

He said yes. I then proceeded to tell him how there were all different causes of blindness, some where the eyes are perfect but the connection to the brain or within the brain is at fault.

"I read about all different kinds of blindness in a particular neurology book. For instance....." Fortunately my brain was working faster than my mouth and the schema for an entire new poem comparing and contrasting different types of blindness unveiled itself to my mind's inner eye before I continued with the sentence.

"Jeesuz, what am I doing, I'm not going to tell you pair. I'm writing that poem meself."

Why I'm not organising anything anymore for the slam fraternity

2010-02-25T18:28:00.004Z

The Cork Spring Literary Festival was incredibly successful this year. Aside from the quality of the writers and some of the amazing performances (Conal Creedon and Martin Espada especially wowed) audience figures were consistently large between 70-100 attendees at each event. We were obliged to move to a bigger venue for the fourth day to avoid breaking fire regulations on overcrowding. I believe there were multiple factors for the increased audiences this year. I believe rebranding the festival as the "Cork Spring" festival made it easier for people to mentally note where and when it was happening. This was the first year we had significant numbers of people travelling from Galway, Limerick and Dublin just to sit in the audience. We had many new younger faces and faces we had never seen at our events before. I believe the use of Facebook was crucial in attracting a different, younger demographic and many people believe holding the event in a hotel rather than a dedicated arts institution made it appear less elitist and more accessible. The generosity of so many people coming to events and buying almost 3,000 euro worth of poetry books was to be noted.
But once again the majority of the Live Mic fraternity bewrayed their total Me Fein, self-centred interests. We had many of these people turning up just for the open mic competition we organised and no other event, in spite of us bringing the best of Irish writing from home and abroad and eminent American writers from Boston and San Francisco who had never appeared at Irish festivals before. (Watch out for Martin Espada at a festival near you soon, he impressed so much he received an invitation back to Ireland from another member of the audience the night of his reading).
We put up a 200 euro prize, paid a professional thespian-poet judge a modest fee of 150 euro, we had the expense of room hire, sound equipment hire, staff time, all to cater for a group of people who, in the main, had no interest in any other writer except themselves. Were they grateful for our efforts in catering for their rarefied, self-centered interests? Were they fuck!
One complained that she wasn't allowed to read two pieces instead of one like everyone else, another person accused the time keeper of robbing her of minutes in her performance. As I said already a majority of these people attended no other event. I'm delighted to report that the prize went to John Walsh of Galway who did attend other events at the festival (not that the judge would have known).
But I'm left thinking why should I do anything for this largely selfish constituency in the future.

Ethel Voynich, legendary Cork-born writer

2010-02-12T15:43:00.003Z

(ETHEL LILIAN VOYNICH IS 95 YEARS OLD)

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Ethel Voynich is easily the best-selling Irish author of all time. Yet nobody knows about her in the country of her birth. Voynich's novel The Gadfly sold over 2 and half million copies in Russia and even more in China. It was adapted as a film in 1928 and again in 1955 with a specially-commissioned soundtrack by Shostakovich and made into a Chinese mini-television series in 2005. Click on the picture above to be brought to video showing her being feted in New York by members of the Bolshoi Ballet on the occasion of her 95th birthday in 1959.

Yiyun Li interviewed by Patrick Cotter

2010-01-26T12:28:00.003Z

In four parts, in low resolution. Followed by a DVD quality source. If your computer does not have a good enough speaker you might do better listening on earphones.

At the 2008 Frank O'Connor Short Story Festival in Cork, Ireland, interviewed by Patrick Cotter, Yiyun Li touches on how she develops character, about her family background, dealing with political interviewers, her experience of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, her love of Irish writers and much else. 26 minutes in total.

Watch Yiyun Li interviewed by Patrick Cotter in Travel & Culture | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

The Bodega Gets Its Groove Back

2010-01-24T17:08:00.002Z

The Bodega has its groove back! It was shut for a long time and then reopened with the decor of a nouveau richeist's Italian villa. Service was not the best. I came across acquaintances who decided to leave after waiting 45 minutes for their order. That was about six months ago. Today I'm writing this blog from the Bodega, courtesy of the welcome free wi-fi. The staff have been most courteous and attentive. The people-watching has generally improved with a drift-back of the original clientel-types, although, the more ambient light and my weakening eyesight detract from that. The music is not so loud so that it disuades conversation.

The quality of attracting arty-types of all ages and stages of life development is the great attraction of this pub. People can bring their kids in the afternoon and hang out with no hassle or friction alongside young and old singles.

The potted plants are gone and so too the original sculpture pieces. But there are new pieces and the chandeliers look like they've been designed by Jeff Koons on sedatives. But many of the references to be found in my "Bodega Sequence" no longer apply.

It makes the perfect writer's hangout again, with plenty of powerpoints around for laptops and no one staring at you as if the book you are reading is a second head.

The Lore of Place

2010-01-10T21:42:00.009Z

I’m excited by the upcoming Cork Spring Literary Festival February 17th to 20th (which I’m curating). The theme changes every year. In the past we’ve done love, politics, spirituality, migration and this year we are featuring writing which explores sense of place. Dinnseanchas or the lore of place is integral to the Irish literary tradition and the late Sean O Tuama has written that while place features in every literary tradition, the writers of no other European country are as obsessed with place as have Irish writers been.

We’ll have Jennifer Johnston who will be enjoyed not only by the regular attendees of literary festivals but also those bourgeois types who drag themselves out solely for a name familiar to them from the broadsheet review pages and TV culture programmes. I’m contemplating a scheme where entry to the Johnston gig will be free to anyone who regularly attends the other events but will cost 15-20 euro for those who just come to see her. Reading with Jennifer will also be an exciting young American and near namesake Adam Johnson who has published short story collections, a novel and who teaches in the writing department of Stanford. Sharing the stage with Adam and Jennifer will be Denyse Woods who has published a number of literary novels with Penguin and some potboilers under the pseudonym Devlin. Denyse has just been appointed as Artistic Director of the West Cork Literary Festival for 2010.

Other fiction writers featured this year will be Conal Creedon whose plays were recently received with glowing reviews in New York and Mary Leland who has published two novels, a story collection and who was just recently shortlisted for the Davy Byrne’s Award.

I like to feature mostly poets during this festival because of our concentration on fiction during the Frank O’Connor Short Story Festival. Derek Mahon, Paula Meehan, Bernard O’Donoghue, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain and Desmond O’Grady are all being featured, teamed with Cork City resident authors. Featured Cork authors with recent new books include Eugene O'Connell, Thomas McCarthy whose The Last Geraldine Officer has received rave and considered reviews from Maurice Harmon and Bernard O’Donoghue; Martina Evans whose Facing the Public continues to mine the Macroom of her childhood for literary gold; we are honoured that Theo Dorgan will be launching with us his first original full-length poetry collection since the last century Greek – featuring poems all of which focus on Greece and Greek culture.

Other out of town poets of note attending include big guns such as Ciaran O’Driscoll, Gerard Smyth, Patrick Moran, Mary O’Malley and Michael Coady who has just published a substantial new collection.

The younger generation of writers is being represented by such names as Matthew Geden, Liz O’Donoghue, Louis De Paor and Billy Ramsell.

Last but not least we are featuring one of the USA’s most famous of contemporary poets (one who has yet to be exported as successfully as some others) Martin Espada who has been described as the leading Latino poet writing in English. He has published in Southword a brilliant essay on sense of place. His work is noted for its political commitment without being polemical. He is very much influenced by Pablo Neruda and other Iberian-language poets. For my money, he is the only foreigner who has written successfully about Ireland in poetry without sounding like a tourist.

A timetable can be found here . A fully-downloadable programme should be available next week.

Best Irish Poetry 2010

2009-12-02T13:46:00.004Z

The fourth issue of Best of Irish Poetry has just been published. It is a handsome looking volume featuring a photo by Russian Evgeniy Shaman. It appears to be from the same photoshoot as the image in my blog banner.
This year it is edited by Matthew Sweeney who does a good job of casting an insider/outsider eye on the Irish poetry scene. Matthew has spent most of the last twenty years moving in the poetry circles of Britain and Germany and in his introduction admits pleasant surprise to discover for the first time poetry imprints such as Doghouse, Arlen House and Bradshaw Books. He has done a great job not only in selecting poems published in Irish literary journals but also poems by Irish poets in periodicals from across Britain and North America. The big names known to non-specialist readers such as Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon and Michael Longley are here along with other established names such as Pearse Hutchinson, Kerry Hardie, John F. Deane and Eamon Grennan. Women are well represented especially from the younger generation such as Sinead Morrissey, Leontia Flynn and Leanne O’Sullivan. There are also poets here who will be previously unknown to even the most expert reader of contemporary Irish poetry. 12 euro in the shops. It is available at a special price of ten euro from http://www.munsterlit.ie/

Beggars for Capitalism

2009-10-17T14:00:00.007+01:00

The artists’ tax exemption scheme should be scrapped and replaced with an arrangement where artists are assessed on all their income over a five-year period. None of us likes paying taxes, yet, proverbially at least they are as inevitable as death. Taxes are what we rely on to pay for health care, education provision, culture spend and much else besides.
I’m opposed to the Artists’ tax exemption scheme because I believe it is morally indefensible and not of real benefit to real artists anyhow. Most artists in Ireland do not earn enough to pay taxes and most people who benefit from the artist’s tax exemption are not artists. Bono is not an artist: he is a composer of pop ephemera and no qualification is necessary to dismiss Celia Ahern (millionaire chicklit author and Mrs to another millionaire pop ephemerist) as an artist. The argument that these millionaires and others should be exempt from tax while an individual on the minimum wage supporting an unemployed spouse and children in rented accommodation should contribute tax towards the funds needed to provide policing, roads, street lighting etc. that these millionaires also benefit from is morally indefensible.

Most poets, visual artists, dramatists etc do not earn enough from their imagination to make a living, let alone pay taxes. If someone does not earn enough to pay taxes, then they don’t pay taxes, nothing could be simpler than that fact. The less money you earn, the less complicated your relationship to tax is. The problem for most artists who do earn enough to pay tax is that they have good years followed by fallow years. A novel which earns its author €200,000 in a single year may have taken five or more years to write. It would not be unusual for this to be the only significant earning for a novelist in a long, long time. Assessed over a five year period these earning would equal an annual salary of 40,000 a year – the average industrial earnings. Someone on this wage with a single parent or marriage tax allowance would currently face annual deductions of about 5,000 euro. If the novelist deducted as business expenses her spend on computer and peripheral costs, stationery, post, phone, internet, web design etc. she could arguably reduce her tax liability to close to zero. I would propose that the artist/poet/novelist be assessed on their earnings over a five year period to allow for this situation. In any case most artists would still not earn enough from their creative efforts to pay tax.
Currently, if you are a writer who earns from giving readings or lectures or workshops you are obliged to declare these earnings for tax purposes. Most writers earn more from readings and workshops than they do from royalties. If all of a writer’s earnings, not just royalties, were assessed over a five year period, most writers would legally benefit more than from the present situation – and they would still be paying their fair share of tax – the same as anyone else on the same earnings level.
If all the millionaires and other high earners benefiting from the artist’s tax exemption paid their fair share the government would have more money available to increase bursaries to those artists who need them.
One of the biggest drawbacks in the current system is that not the Arts Council, not Aosdana, nor any artists’ representative organisation is consulted by the Revenue as to who should qualify for the exemption. The Revenue decide for themselves. And the sort of individual who is benefiting most often is bringing the scheme and the reputation of the arts sector in to disrepute. Why should a professional historian already receiving an exorbitant salary or pension from a university qualify for a tax exemption on his book royalties? Why should a brainless popular broadcaster whose book was ghostwritten? Why shouldn’t “ordinary tax payers” be enraged when they hear of these examples? Why should anyone on a good income from whatever source not pay their fair share of tax?

Artists are codding themselves by supporting the tax exemption scheme. Most of them will never earn enough to be charged tax and if there were fewer tax exemptions in all spheres of Irish life there would be more money in state coffers to provide for artist bursaries, grants, commissions etc.

Artists are special in the irregularity of their earnings – this reality should be accommodated by assessing them for tax over a five year period, not by exempting them entirely and obliging even poorer people to shoulder the burden of financing state services on artists’ behalf.

The average artist or writer who supports the current tax exemption scheme is like a street beggar who supports extreme capitalism just in case he one day becomes a millionaire.

Lolita proves Lyne is a Langer

2009-10-12T00:03:00.008+01:00

In spite of being a Nabokov fan since the age of seventeen (the short story collection Tyrants Destroyed being my first purchase. The story “Music” and the one about the cocainist remain my favourites) I spent twelve years avoiding viewing Adrian Lyne’s “movie” Lolita. In 1986 I had been dragged to see 9 and one half weeks by my future ex-wife. It was a cause celebre of a film in spite of not being the sort of material to excite the average Sundance film festival aficionado. It was in fact cinematically illiterate.
So when I heard in 1995 Langer Lyne had decided to adapt Lolita for the screen I groaned like a goat in labour. When it was released in 1997 I avoided it like the proverbial plague. I avoided it in the cinema. I avoided it on television, I avoided it in the video cassette and later DVD emporia. I avoided buying it at full price. I avoided buying it at discount price. I avoided buying it in any ten for the price of one dvd promotion sales. I would even have avoided accepting it as a freebie giveaway with a Sunday broadsheet had it been offered that way.
Stanley Kubrick’s 1960’s adaptation was a less than adequate representation of the novel but was a very successfully realised film with its own artistic qualities. At the very least it captured the dark irony and malevolent humour of Nabokov.
Last week Lyne’s crime against aesthetes and anti-paedophiles was broadcast on film four and I decided to record it on my skybox (the European version of a tivo whatsit).
I lasted six minutes before I decided to fast forward through the rest of the movie. Lyne’s movie was not without its redeeming features. There were at least two. 1st it portrayed Lolita as an innocent prepubescent at the start of the story, thereby underscoring the tragedy of her abuse (something Kubrick missed out on) The second redeeming feature was the casting of the American character actor (whose name I’ve never learned) in the role of Quilty. Everything else about the film was vomit-inducing.
Ironically Lyne’s version tracks the arc of Nabokov’s plot more faithfully than Kubrick’s, proving if proof were necessary that the appeal of Nabokov’s novel is not in its subject matter. Its appeal resides in its language, in its structure/form; in its dark, dark humour juxtaposed with the subject matter.
A further irony to Lyne’s “movie” is that whenever he believes he needs to sexually arouse the viewer he attempts it by presenting an animated parody of a Balthus painting where his leading actress’s long legs are on display in all sorts of configuration. Fast forwarding reveals that a good 15% of the film is taken up with this sort of crap. The irony of this Lyne stratagem is that Nabokov wrote an earlier novel called Laughter in the Dark which features an idiot of an anti-hero whose life ambition is to produce animated films where the paintings of the great masters come to life.
Nabokov would piss himself with laughter watching this movie if he wasn’t already spouting blood from every orifice with apoplexy.
Last point: Jeremy Irons might be a nice man but what a ham. He makes the worst Humbert Humbert. I’m convinced he’s the reason I didn’t like the film Swann’s Way. Try to visualise Irons in the Daniel Day Lewis role in The Unbearable Lightness of Being and you’ll understand exactly what I mean. He recently murdered some Yeats' poems by declamation on Irish radio.

Mean Irish Fuckers

2009-10-08T21:49:00.001+01:00

I’ve just returned from a viewing of Peader Lamb’s new windows which have been commissioned for the Irish repertory theatre in New York. Peader Lamb is quite simply the greatest Irish stained glass artist since Harry Clarke. Like Clarke his strengths include good draughtsmanship and a compulsion to narrate through glass. Arguably his colour sense is superior to Clarke’s. This new work has been commissioned by a New York-based art lover called Clementina Santi Flaherty. The surname is a bit of a misnomer: she’s not of Irish background, she’s a self-made woman who married a Flaherty. In fact if she had been a genuine Flaherty I would have been gobsmacked because it is practically unknown for the rich Irish to sponsor the arts. Sure why would you want to spend money on the arts when you could have more fun with horses and yachts?
In my office is an eight inch thick tome listing most of the fellowships and private individuals in America who sponsor the arts. The paucity of Irish names is striking, page after page is full of Wasp and Jewish names. Is it any wonder that the new art gallery in UCC has been paid for by someone called Glucksman and not O’Sullivan or Murphy?
But worse is that an artist of Lamb’s genius has to export his brilliance: a window portraying scenes from Irish plays, incorporating portraits of great Irish playwrights. Why hasn’t someone in the Abbey had the good sense to commission something like this already? After all those fuckers get 8 million a year. About four times the amount the entire literature sector in Ireland gets put together. http://www.peadarlamb.com/home.html

Joyce Estate to sue Enda Kenny

2009-10-06T13:24:00.002+01:00

The Joyce Estate has announced that it is to sue Enda Kenny, leader of Fine Gael for infringement of copyright. They say that at the post Lisbon referendum press conference Kenny's declamation of the word "yes" consecutively four times was a shameless plagiarism of Molly Bloom's soliloquy. Lawyers for Stephen Joyce said: "Saying 'yes' three times consecutively is arguably an infringement, but in such cases we have been leniant. However when Mr Kenny decided to say 'yes' four consecutive times it was a 'yes' too far and my client had no alternative but to intervene and safeguard his intellectual property rights. Arguably James Joyce's moral rights as an author have also been sullied by Mr Kenny uttering the words without the correct intonation but we will not be pursuing that matter at this juncture."

Read it and Weep

2009-10-03T10:19:00.002+01:00

I didn't know whether to laugh or to cry reading this so I did both. (Blog title is link)

Speech delivered for the launch of Leanne O'Sullivan's latest book Cailleach (Bloodaxe 2009)

2009-03-18T15:00:00.004Z

Leanne O’Sullivan is a very popular person. Not every poet is a popular person so that’s something worth mentioning and not every popular person is a good poet, but there are some poets whose popularity exceeds their talent, underscoring how rare it is to find a poet whose talent matches her popularity. Leanne has distinguished herself through her talent from a young age. Before the advent of Leanne and Billy Ramsell on the scene it looked as if a great twenty year outflow of poetic talent from Cork and from UCC had come to an end. After a greatly disappointing decade of silence, people took pleasure from the simple existence of these two young poets striving to make things happen on the page. One older poet who at a certain point hadn’t yet read Leanne and who I think like many of us had been jaded by the constant stream in these islands of good-looking young women pushed upon us as the new Sylvia Plath, Nuala Ni Dhomnaill or Medbh McGuckian; this older poet turned to me and one evening asked “But is she any good?”
I responded with great feeling in my voice “She’s more than good. She’s the real thing.”
What did I base this opinion on? Certainly not the garland of prizes she had won before the age of twenty or the breadth of specialist publications she had been published in. Because quite frankly I know of some wonderful poets who have not won prizes or who have not even published widely in journals before producing a book. Nor was it because of the famous endorsers, the likes of Billy Collins, because frankly I’ve known of young poets being endorsed for all the wrong reasons.
My opinion was based on the poems in Waiting for my Clothes (Bloodaxe 2004) those poems revealed a poet with a wonderful sense of metaphor with a facility for bringing into being sentences, cadences of the most wonderful felicity, a unique poetic expression which signalled the arrival of a new original, found voice.
There was a time when the making of myth wasn’t about the concealing of truth but the revealing of truth, the sort of truth which cannot be accounted for through the discourse of fact. A physical geographer could tell us many things about the Beara peninsula, the location of dormant volcanoes, the point where one type of rock beds down with another, it could be a description peppered with words such as drumlins and moraines, locutions such as “major tectonic lineaments” or “lithospheric “block” boundaries”, sounds not without their poetic possibilities, but which appearing at the point of a professional academic’s nib contain little of the truth we turn to myth and poetry for.

In Cailleach Leanne O’Sullivan performs a poetic operation which involves the resurrection and resuscitation of old local myths which have not had the currency of national sagas. These myths have arguably had more life in them than the stories of Lir and Fionn and Setanta and Grainne precisely because they haven’t been codified but have continued to grow and morph in the mouths of generations of Beara locals. It was the function of myth before the centuries of scientific authority eradicated myth from most of our lives, to grow and evolve and adapt to changing circumstances in life and it was always in the minds of poets that Myth reached its full truth-bearing potential.

In Cailleach we have a living breathing part of Ireland whose truth is encapsulated in a language which makes no allowances for The Celtic Tiger. The ephemeral nature of the Tiger economy is acknowledged in a truthful account of the Beara peninsula without reference to bungalows and holiday villas, BMW motors and combine harvesters, without reference to a young immersing themselves in take-away curries and Bacardi Breezers. The fisherman whom the Cailleach lusts and loves doesn’t work on a factory ship.

Much of the discourse of Celtic Tiger Ireland will soon be redundant and in a generation or two incomprehensible to anyone not a social historian. In Cailleach Leanne O’Sullivan has couched her new myths in a language which will be more enduring, enduring when it tells us of waves sweeping out like bursting glass or the milk-warm scent of cattle being woven into someone’s clothes.

Eavan Boland talks about the place that happened and the place that happened to you, a third place is the place which is the object of the word happened where writer is the subject. After tonight Beara isn’t merely the place that happened to Leanne O’Sullivan, it’s the place Leanne O’Sullivan happened to.

And if I didn’t have the respect an Irish poet has for the fermented juice of the vine, I would at this very moment be shattering a bottle of Champagne over this book about a jagged, shardy peninsula, shaped itself like a giant, tectonic ship, thrusting into the ocean.

Introduction to poetry reading Shanghai March 14th 2009

2009-03-15T00:01:00.003Z

A complaint which has been heard by everyone who has spent a lifetime professionally around books, whether as a librarian or bookseller, editor or book reviewer, is from the occasional individual who claims that they can never read novels because they are not true, that they can only read factual forms such as histories, biographies, travelogues etc.

Well of course most if not all people in this room will recognise the naivety of such a statement, because we know that not all histories, biographies etc. are strictly factual. Yet the stated complaint illustrates perfectly a recurring problem for many readers; the inability to understand the difference between truth and fact.

Take two recent news stories: the United States dispatching a flotilla of destroyers to the South China Seas in the past few days and Prime Minister Wen, commenting publicly for the first time about the investment of trillions of Chinese foreign reserves in US debt and the caution of the Chinese authorities in the face of the precarious American ability to repay that debt; these two events are undeniable facts, but their presentation in close juxtaposition in a text speaks volumes about the truth of Sino-American relations. Now if these two events had never occurred, arguably a novelist or a poet could still have written about them, actually invented them, presented them in the same way and even as invented non-factual events in a writer’s imagination they would have still conveyed the same truth behind Sino-American relations.

This is how writers convey the truth all the time through non-facts. Historically the truth has often been portrayed through myth and in ancient myth, events were rarely portrayed in a realistic way, so if we hired an ancient writer of myths to relate the events of the last couple of days, he might write about a huge pod of enormous whales containing entire armies of American soldiers in their bellies or a Prime Minister Wen whose tongue was possessed by a spirit or a ghost with an agenda of its own, making the Prime Minister speak as he did.

Myth received a very bad name in the West in the 18th and 19th Century because during the Enlightenment there was this huge pressure, wherever the intellect operated, to verify all truths as verifiable facts. This is how fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible and Koran emerged. In the minds of these people Adam and Eve actually existed, because fundamentalists cannot get their minds around truth that is not expressed through fact. Political fundamentalists have this problem too.

The Marxist-Leninist regimes of Europe provided the greatest service to Western literature by resurrecting the use of myth in the work of poets as a means to portraying the truth. Because the apparatchiks were unable to decode surrealist and expressionist literary techniques many Polish, Czech, Bulgarian and Estonian poets were able to write without compromising their own truth or attracting the eye of the censor.

The great thing about such contemporary myth-making techniques is that they can be used in the service of conveying not just political truths but personal truths and that is what I am mainly doing in my most recent book Making Music – where there are many poems linked through the shared extended metaphoric possibilities presented by angels.

I will read first from this new book which was completed by the printers last Monday when I was already in Shanghai, so unfortunately I don’t have copies with me but they are available to purchase through my website http://www.patrickcotter.ie/ I will then read from Perplexed Skin and I do have copies of that with me.

Gregory Orr, Palm Beach Poetry Festival and Restoration Topiary

2009-02-23T12:17:00.009Z

Apologies to the one or two people who started to care about this blog. I'm afraid the pressures of readying several books for the printers (including my own next offering) and the organisational demands of a poetry festival just finished, led me to neglect this particular responsibility. But here we go again.....

I found the Palm Beach Poetry Festival by chance. Last year I had Ilya Kaminski as a guest in Cork and he recommended a festival in the Florida Keys as a good place to do a gig. “Just Google ‘Florida’ and ‘Poetry Festival’,” he said. That’s how I found the Palm Beach Poetry Festival’s website. Straight away what intrigued me about it was how it was structured around a large number of week-long workshops – about ten or twelve running simultaneously. I had been to festivals across Europe and had never come across this set-up. It was like it was a festival of workshops with readings tacked on. The punters’ fees were in the order of over $700. I made a mental note that I would follow it up one of these years.

When I read late last year that Gregory Orr was one of the workshop leaders this year I knew 2009 was when I had to go. I had picked up a copy of Orr’s The Red House in the late 80s and it had had a tremendous effect on me. Here was a poetry which was structurally, linguistically and formally so simple but which yet had huge resonance. In many ways it was antithetical to much of my own very wordy work of that period, but in other ways it had much in common with the 20th Century German poets who had staked out huge territory in my own personal, private anthology of great poets and poems – poets such as Gottfried Benn, Georg Trakl and of course Paul Celan. Orr’s The Red House whispered the qualities of poetry into every fibre of my being, yet I had to acknowledge at the same time that this was writing which most poetry editors in these islands would fail to recognise as poetry.

Even big, established names such as Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes were, in the mid to late 80’s receiving reviews in the British press accusing their latest European and American influenced work of being technically sloppy. While the work of Zbigniew Herbert, Marin Sorescu and Miroslav Holub was much admired in these islands any British or Irish poet who published work similar in structure was dismissed as technically incompetent. Poetry was deemed to be not achieved unless there was a noticeable rhythmical character with stanzas neat and uniform as Restoration topiary.

So in 1989, greatly invigorated by my reading of Gregory Orr, I found myself writing the first poems in what would become a nine poem sequence “The Garden”. I believed at the time it was some of the best work I had ever done. A few of the poems appeared in Poetry Ireland Review but generally the sequence was met with a “What the fuck are you up to, Pat?” response, even from people I knew were generally sympathetic to me.

I had to wait another nineteen years before the sequence was published in its entirety. An anthologist selected work of mine in the early 90s but rejected these poems in utter incomprehension. I started to believe I had made a huge misstep and for many complex reasons stopped writing completely for about six years. How I started to write again is a subject for another blog.

Nineteen years later when I had finally found a publisher willing to risk more than a chapbook with me I had practically forgotten I had written “The Garden”. It tumbled out of an old computer file almost at the last minute, in time for me to stick it into the manuscript with a “What the fuck?” shrug of my shoulders. When the book was published, its different parts had many admirers, reflecting their different tastes but one reviewer did single out “The Garden” as the best achievement in the book and the sequence was translated and published in its entirety in Estonia’s leading poetry journal, (in a slot which had been filled by Billy Collins the previous quarter). All this belated attention for “the Garden” led to very mixed feelings for me. On the one hand I felt happy and vindicated for the young poet who had produced it twenty years previously - on the other hand I felt sadness and deep regret that the young poet who created those poems had stopped working for six years, almost for life, because he lived in a community of poetry which led him to believe what he was writing was worthless.

The chance to meet Gregory Orr, to take a week of workshops with the poet whose work had inspired a walk down “The Garden” path and to combine it with my other reasons for going to the Palm Beach Poetry Festival was too much to resist.

My other main reason for going was to study the business model of the festival, how in hell did they succeed in bringing almost 100 people thousands of miles across America to one place, each spending thousands of dollars in the process? Was it a model worth replicating in Ireland? Who were these people? How did they hear about it? What would it take to attract them to Ireland for something similar?

Armed with funds from my day job and a generous Arts Council travel grant I went off to find out. I knew there were personal risks in going to meet Greg Orr. I had met poetry heroes before and had sometimes been disappointed to discover the person in the flesh, I’m thinking now in particular of a famous Irish poet who had a drinking problem and was completely obnoxious with it. Glad to say he has been on the dry for over a decade now and is perfectly charming and convivial as a result. But I knew that liking Gregory Orr’s poetry was no guarantee that I was going to like Gregory Orr in person.

To be continued……

Angel Patriot

2009-01-02T11:07:00.006Z

There is a black feathered angel who has skin as pale as bleached vellum. His eyes are the blue of synthetic ice. He wanders the parquet floors of the Crawford Art Gallery sniffing at the post-nineteenth century exhibits: the canvasses which proclaim “God is dead” and the conceptual installations which disdain craft and persistence. That first time he was astonished by my own open-mouthed perceiving of him and immediately raised a frosted finger to his lips so the nearby class of long robed Limerick convent girls would learn nothing of him. “I have three arias and five choral symphonies running simultaneously in the chambers of my many cerebra.” he confided, but still had a spare string of neurones to listen to me. All I had were the usual inquiries which he patiently answered for the first time in decades. His name could not be annunciated but sounded only by running a silver comb through the final three feathers of an angel’s right wingtip. Early in the Godless century he had been the guardian of a gifted boy who yearned to paint but was so poor he could draw only by scraping slate flagstones with flints of lime. In his short life the boy haunted the gallery and expired of consumption here one afternoon. The angel had stayed ever since. “Are you a painter?” he said, his face filled with concern for himself. Why after a century of anonymity should he be open now to the probing of my eyes? When I confessed to being a poet, and a minor one to boot, he was appalled. “But I have no interest in poetry.” I calmed him by assuring him I had no need of his guarding and would not make him leave the gallery. “I’m Godless too,” I told him. The mixture of relief and disgust expressed simultaneously on his face was beyond the reach of any actor. We still meet whenever I call in. Lately he was taken by the Daniel Maclise exhibition. When I told him Maclise was described as being of the British School in the Prince of Wales Museum in Bombay he became apoplectic. Angels have nationality too it seems.

(from Making Music, forthcoming 2009)

Millions Poet

2008-12-27T14:18:00.003Z

It sounds like a legpull, devised by a young Trinity bard disgusted by the vulgarity of life as epitomised by Louis Walsh, Simon Whatisname etc but it is as real as a TV talent show can be: “Millions Poet” is a TV show sponsored by the Culture Ministry of the United Arab Emirates and broadcast live throughout the Arab speaking world on television every Thursday night. There is a panel of five judges drawn from the world of academe and poetry publishing. Winners are chosen by SMS. The prize is not only the glory of the title but a cash prize of 5 million Dirhams (about 950,000 euro or two thirds of a Nobel prize). The competition has been going for some years now and it looks like we’ll never get to read the winners in English translation or see Millions Poet being won by any of the brilliant Arabic poets who sometimes get published in English. The poets are restricted to writing Nabati poetry – a traditional Bedouin form. (“Nabati poetry, in contrast to Classical Arabic poetry, is written in the everyday dialect of the Peninsula and reflects daily life of everyday people. It has a simple, direct and spontaneous style.”) Arabic Slam in other words.

In the latest episode “The only Libyan participating in the competition, Almabrook Othman Abu Derheyba, received high praises from the judges for his beautiful and soulful verses praising women and their place in society as wives, mothers, sisters and daughters.” It’s a pity they don’t have Carol Ann Duffy or Sarah Maguire as one of the judges. It’s a pity we don’t have our own “Poet Idol”. Any ideas on the perfect four member jury?

Poetry Brothel

2008-12-21T10:12:00.003Z

I'm conflicted over the Poetry Brothel. Here is their MySpace “about me” spiel:

"The Poetry Brothel is the first event of its kind to seduce New York City. A new and dreamlike twist on a poetry reading, The Poetry Brothel is foremost interested in the presentation of excellent, original literature. However, it is also an interactive performance art event based on the concept of a brothel. The "Madame" presents a rotating cast of this city's finest poets (both men and women) engaged in a night of literary debauchery and private poetry readings. Here's how it works: The poets play "whores," visitors play "johns" (and are also encouraged to attend incognito!) but instead of physical intimacy, the poets offer the intimacy of their poetry by giving private, one-on-one readings in curtained-off areas. For a small fee, all of the resident "whores" are available for private readings at any time during the event. Of course, every good brothel needs a furtive "front" or cover business; ours is part saloon and part salon, offering a full bar, blackjack table (played for prizes), tarot card readings, live painting, and live music, with newly integrated performances and installations from our poets, performers, and artists each month. Each night "The Madame" will also introduce "the new girl," a surprise featured reader who will punctuate the evening with a few special public performances. "

"The Poetry Brothel, organized and hosted by The Madame and Tennessee Pink, is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. It is funded in part by Poets & Writers, Inc. with public funds from The New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency."

Arguments

1) The remnant of fun-loving adolescent in me thinks: What Fun! All that make-believe, safe, ersatz naughtiness where poetry is centre stage. Sexiness and poetry what more could you want?

2) The literary event programmer in me thinks: what a clever way of getting money out of funders who really hate poetry; especially general arts festival programmers who feel obliged to cater for poetry somehow but hate the fact that the average poetry reading appears to them undynamic. They would rather invest the poet’s reading fee into something spectacular like a naked man, chest smeared in pig’s blood, sticking thumb-tacks through his eyelids in the name of performance art.

3) The Feminist in me thinks any suggestion that there is no harm in women being portrayed as “available” for the Yankee dollar is at base evil and ultimately likely to lead onto the patronising of the genuine sex industry where all women are exploited victims, will lead to an increase in incidence of casual rape and an increase in human trafficking.

4) The poetry curmudgeon in me thinks that anything used to dress up a poetry reading whether live music, various sound effects, slide shows, dramatic lighting, free wine or Moulin –Rouge attired motts is an appeal to bastards who at base don’t like poetry anyway, proves the organiser has no confidence in the power of poetry alone and once again wastes money which could be spent directly on poets and poetry.

5) After all these thoughts I think how the idea of my daughter or sister (if I had one) working in a lap dancing establishment (or titty bar as an American writer of my acquaintance succinctly refers to them) is a definite No! No! but I might not be upset at the idea of my daughter (when she reaches 18) (or myself after losing 20 pounds) acting in a “poetry brothel”. Does this gut feeling mean that my Feminist response is too tight-assed or that my inner adolescent has managed to conveniently justify himself?

Answers not on a postcard please.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5i05leBeM_6D_hlmUDplJls19e6rQ

Destroy Philip Levine's Blue Collar Halo

2008-12-20T20:17:00.004Z

Recently, in Paris, in one of the apparently not-talking-to-each-other Bay-area-related second-hand English-language bookshops I found myself perusing a well-stocked poetry section with few books or poets not already on my shelves at home. I had a manic compulsion to depart the shop with a new acquisition come high or low Seine and eventually satisfied my compulsive bibliomania by purchasing an old Philip Levine New and Selected (1991). Levine was one of those prominent American poets who had slipped through my net which had already caught contemporaries such as Ashbury, Gunn, Hecht, Collins, Simic, Orr, Lux, Olds, Kleinzahler and Seidel among others. The reek from Levine was never quite right but not in a spotted, red mushroom – stay-the-hell-away-from-me way like Mary Oliver.

The reek from Levine centres around the question, are competent working class poets in America so rare that so much has to be repeatedly made of Philip Levine’s blue collar credentials? Especially considering he had the luck to become a member of a privileged middle class academic elite while still in the first half of his life. The taint of middle-class-sanctioned worthiness permeating from his reputation put me off reading him for years and indeed many of the poems written about his less well-off days, from the perspective of his secure maturity, do reek of a certain politically correct worthiness; lacking the fire and danger such material might have had had it been written by someone especially gifted and still poor. Perhaps the distance of the subject matter is something many middle class Americans find exotic in the same way the exoticism of the Orient fascinated Westerners before they discovered an Oriental was a carpet, not a person. (politically correct - moi?)

Poets of working-class extraction are not so exotic in Europe and elsewhere, where Social Democratic states have evolved to the stage where access to university education is more equable than it is in the land of Chicago School Economics and where poets with factory-working Dads have been coming off the conveyer belt since the mid-Seventies.

Levine is a brilliant poet, but his brilliance has nothing to do with being everybody’s favourite white trash. His best poems have nothing to do with having had to endure “a succession of stupid jobs” or about anything else really. Levine’s genius resides not in his subject matter (although often compelling) but in his own personal, consistent, unique idiom – an idiom distinguished by Levine’s tendency to read the world through metaphor as distinct from the many poets who try to devise metaphors after their reading of the world. The other thing that distinguishes Levine’s work is the way his language chimes without regular metre and rhyme. In his lines individual words slot sonicly together, harmonising in a subtle, seamless fashion - in the same way they do in the language of Derek Mahon; only apparently less showily because of Levine’s eschewing the scaffolding of rhyme which Mahon has convinced himself he needs. Thomas McCarthy also has this gift. Very few contemporary American poets can do this. The likes of Collins, Simic, Orr, Lux, Olds can’t do it. Kleinzahler has the sonic slotting thing happening but in an (not altogether displeasuring) ostentatious, fireworks way as in ‘Green Sees Things in Waves’ and anything taken from The Strange Hours Travellers Keep.
So I guess the point of this rant is to say: American poetry journalists please stop praising Philip Levine for all the wrong patronising reasons, making him out to be some sort of boring transatlantic Social Realist and putting off Europeans for whom working-class culture is not exotic and a Liberal is someone who sits on the right-hand side of the parliamentary chamber.