Pigeons I Have Known

Often when people attend a poetry workshop at a festival they bring their best, well-made, well-honed, unpublished piece, just to show off and establish their credentials. Me – I always bring a piece giving me trouble, not quite working, hoping for an objective eye to point out where it could be improved or how it might be made to work. Once at a workshop in Florida I presented a poem about a suicidal pigeon in San Francisco on the edge of China Town. Of course, it being a poem it was about more than just the pigeon but it described how she hopped out into the middle of the road as she tried to cross the street on foot, as if she had forgotten she had wings (like Samsa’s beetle) and reached half way across the asphalt before a Cadillac ran her over and there was an explosion of pigeon feathers like grey confetti. and – greater surprise - when the traffic had cleared the sight of the pigeon, stll waddling, still alive, reaching for the opposite sidewalk with dishevelled tail feathers and a Loony Toons aura to her.

Everyone on the street stared. When she reached the other side she walked the short walk to the next intersection where she prepared to throw herself into the traffic on foot all over again. I talked in the poem about how I had never known another pigeon quite like it, of all the pigeons I had known in my home city in Ireland none had behaved like that.

It wasn’t a great poem, but when the celebrity performance poet from Manhattan, a fellow attendee, chose to comment on it he didn’t pick out any of its structural weaknesses or its clunky music. He decided to deride the idea that anyone could have a relationship with or cognizance of an individual pigeon. For him a pigeon was one of a mass of characterless rats with wings and because it was beyond his own experience to know a pigeon individually he wouldn’t (not merely couldn’t) imagine anyone else being able to do so.  I could have told him about my next door neighbour who had pigeons hop all over her hands as if she were some latter day Francis of Assisi whenever she fed them, or the pigeons snared and caged by classmates when I was a boy. I could have described the love one boy had for a pigeon the colour of chocolate or I could have told the Manhatten Celebrity of the astonishment of a friend from Shanghai upon encountering pigeons in Cork by saying “If they were in Shanghai they would be eaten”.  Everyone’s experience is different and the most fatal mistake any writer can make is generalising everyone else’s reality from his own narrow perspective. In fact a great deal of pain exerted by non-writers on fellow humans stems from the same fatal mistake.

Introducing Gregory Orr

Spoken at the Cork Spring Poetry Festival, February 2012

I’m completely baffled that Gregory Orr is not better known outside the United States. I’m baffled that his name never appears in those New York Times lists of names in contention for the position of US poet laureate. So in introducing Orr to an international audience in Cork, Ireland I feel compelled to recount in detail my history as a reader of Gregory Orr’s work and give you the foreground which prepared me to receive him.

I’m fervently of the belief that Poetry is what is NOT lost in translation. Vladimir Nabakov asserted, not entirely sincerely I believe, that literary works are essentially little more than elaborate toys for the entertainment of sophisticated adults. Certainly we can take pleasure in the virtuosity of Larkin’s syntax or Muldoon’s innovative rhymes. We can luxuriate in the comic timing of Pope or Dyrden, but at the end of the day if a poet doesn’t convince us with their poetic sensibility we do not take them to that part of our brain which we refer to symbolically as our heart. A poet’s sensibility, sometimes conflated with Voice, is the product of a person who has successfully expressed the uniqueness of their experience, the uniqueness of their making sense of the world, time and time again, consistently.

Nabokov was right when he said mediocre writers are versatile, genius has only itself to imitate. And while a poet often deploys incantation, symbols, story skilfully to convey sensibility, at the same time sensibility is oddly physically independent of those structural things in the same way that if you hold a computer disc in your hand, turn it this way and that you can’t see the code imprinted upon it and if you wipe the code from the disc the disc appears, physically, to our eye completely unaltered. This is why the technically perfect poems often composed by authors of manuals on poetic form as examples, are completely indigestible, emotionally and intellectually, outside the manual, because like the computer disc devoid of code – they are poetic forms devoid of sensibility.

The main responsibility in translating poetry from one language to another is to preserve the sensibility while transferring it to a completely different medium of sound, of readerly expectation – English is a such a rhyme poor language for instance, that often it’s better to translate a rhyming poem in a foreign language into an unrhymed English version, the better
to preserve its sensibility.

These considerations came into play for me in encountering the work of Gregory Orr for the first time towards the end of the Cold War. And I deliberately say the Cold War rather than the end of the 80s because the political situation pertaining then was crucial to how poetry was received and valued in these islands at that time.

When I began to seriously read poetry for myself as a teenager I was most attracted to work in translation. Penguin had produced a wonderful series of modern poetry in translation at the end of the 60’s and in the 1980s most of those volumes proliferated in second hand book stores because they were mostly by poets writing under Soviet occupation, promoted in the West as victims of a brutal regime, which they were, but often valued more for that fact than for reasons
of their poetic sensibility. So these books were snapped up by people spurred on by the sensationalism of Cold War propaganda and quickly disposed of later, because their readers had no appreciation for poetic sensibility.

The 1980s was a time when Anthony Thwaite, alleged English poet and critic, could declare (Poetry Today : A Critical Guide to British Poetry 1960-1984) that the work of Thom Gunn coming out of America was technically incompetent and that Ted Hughes was sloppy. He was part
of an establishment which professed to admire the work of Paul Celan, Zbigniew Herbert, Mioslav Holub, Vasko Popa, Marin Sorescu, Georg Trakl but was prepared to censure anyone in or of these islands, ready to write in the forms exemplary of these poets , where the length of a line was more often determined by breath length rather than metre or syllabics. Where symbol was more important than rhyme, where organic, unevenly shaped stanzas were preferred to what I refer to
as the typographical topiary of arbitrarily shaped quatrains, tercets, sextets, etc.

This was unfortunate for me because my poetic precursors as I began to write as a teenager were Gottfried Benn and not Philip Larkin, Paul Celan and not ThomasKinsella, Zbigniew Herbert and not Seamus Heaney. Aesthetically, I was left out in the Cold in this Cold War. And I wasn’t the only one. Most women, in Ireland, beginning to write poetry at this time were also unattracted to the traditionalist forms then in ascendancy.

Then one day around 1988-89 I discovered The Red House by Gregory Orr in Connolly’s bookstore in Paul Street. I had never heard of the poet, but a cursory glance through the pages pleased me and it was selling for £2.50.

I brought it home and began to read what appeared to be these very, very simple poems. Apparently so simple in structure and form as to constitute a writing which would barely be recognized as poetry in these islands. I couldn’t imagine Peter Fallon publishing it if he had a thousand lifetimes to consider it and yet I was blown away by their poetic force. They had an undoubted poetic power without, seemingly, any means of visible support. But what they did have was a unifying sensibility whose power was cumulative as you moved from poem to poem, a sensibility bound together by a symbology which was of Orr’s own making - as distinct from the symbology often found in a poet like Yeats which was more tradition in origin.

Orr has also written the virtuoso poem, the poem which could stand out from the crowd in a competition or earn a place for itself in an anthology, but here was a book primarily of poems which did not depend on showy virtuosity, whose power derived from a quietness, a stillness at their core. As a reader and a writer I was inspired. I wrote a sequence of poems which was published in part piece by piece in periodicals but mainly just baffled people here, even poet friends who were favourably disposed towards me.

Twenty years later, assembling a new book, as a last minute caprice I brushed off this ancient sequence and added it. When the reviews came in the part of the book most praised was that sequence. So I returned to Orr as a reader.

Gregory Orr would passionately disagree with the notion that poems are mere elaborate toys for entertainment. Orr believes that poetry is an essential tool for reconciling personal trauma. The tragedies that Orr has had to live through and with, in his life are sensational. And just like sensation drove many Cold War readers to the books of Eastern European poets, many readers seeking sensationalism have flocked to Orr, but just as many readers who find sensationalism disgusting have stayed away, - not realising that stillness and quietness is at the core of his poetry and not the quick, brash emotional fix the sensationalists seek. And because much of Orr’s power as a poet gathers cumulatively from poem to poem, anyone who seeks out the quick virtuoso fix is also often disappointed.

As a human being, approaching, Gregory Orr, I am filled with empathy and sympathy for the man who has suffered such personal tragedies. But as a reader approaching his poems I don’t give a damn, because although his tragedies certainly shaped the kind of poet Orr has turned out to be and occasionally crop up as subject matter in the oeuvre, the tragedies alone do not imbue the work with its worth. Orr’s worth is in the consistent empathy he shows for the human condition, often channelled through showing sympathy for a leaf or a carcass of beef, but always in language which affirms truth in a way that the politician and ostentatious public saint cannot.

By sensibility, Orr is the consistent, un-versatile genius Nabokov described, but over a lifetime, structurally, like Rilke, he has been several different poets. For a period he wrote villanelle after villanelle and more recently his symbol-laden poems addressed to the Beloved evoke The Sonnets to Orpheus or the Duino Elegies. They do this by all originating from the same pod, they resemble each other like multiple embryos split from the same egg, they exude a sacredness like the Opheus Sonnets and in the same way that Rilke’s Elegies and Orpheus Sonnets are semantically more challenging than his Book of Hours or New Poems, Orr’s poems to the Beloved are less accessible than his earlier work and require a different mode of reading.

Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize Results 2011

http://www.sujikwockkim.com/

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

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

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

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

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

'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

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

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

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

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

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

(ETHEL LILIAN VOYNICH IS 95 YEARS OLD)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.