How to Put on a Poetry Festival

Angela Carr has published on Headstuff.org an interview with me in connection with my dayjob:

How to Put on a Poetry Festival

Prelude from New York

Prelude an urbane name for a new, urbane, New York-based journal of poetry edited by Stu Watson and Robert C. L. Crawford. Issue 1 included work by the doyenne of New York poetry, John Ashbury, the ubiquitous John Kinsella and many young American poets who are fast becoming crucial names on the scene. Issue 2 of which I have been lucky to receive a contributor’s copy is a beast of a book, over 300 pages long, handsomely-designed and printed to the best standards on quality paper, heavy enough to use as a weapon of defence against any approaching mugger.

How it’s financed is a mystery to me – it must cost a fortune and doesn’t seem to be supported by any university or foundation. Aside from great poetry it contains readable, compelling, intelligent essays from the editors and others on subjects such as Ashbury in Paris, Wallace Stevens’s relationship with rhyme, the poetics of awareness and forms of rhythm. Poets I admire keeping me company in this issue include Catherine Maya Popa, Rae Armantrout and Katy Lederer. But I’m also intrigued by many names new to me such as Jennifer Soong, Matt Longabucca and Marissa Crawford to name a few.

The contents of this issue can also be accessed for free through their website where you can also find extra content.

 

https://preludemag.com/about/

Tragedy in Paris

This poem of mine was highly commended in this year's Manchester Cathedral Poetry Competition by judge Kim Moore. It treats the complex and complicated political reactions which can result from tragedies such as yesterday's; understandable reactions but jejune and not entirely desirable.

Song of a Maid

Aged eight it came to me in a dream
I had been Joan of Arc in a previous life
and at twelve a tarot reader off Charing
Cross Road, with lightning and rain

smiting the pavement, confirmed it.
My spread was a fascia of swords and staves
and all the war-making cards with faces.
God appears to have forsaken me in this life:

I cannot ride a horse or speak French.
The closest I ever get to wearing armour
is my corduroy duffle coat donned on a turbulent day.
I visited an earl’s great country house so

I could touch his ancestor’s steel breastplates.
When nobody was looking I left the smears
of my fingers and palms. Babysitting
is the highest service I have risen to.

I am fourteen years old. I feel time running
away like a spoilt dog. One child I mind
Oliver, has curls and luminous eyes
of lapis lazuli lifted from a Medici tempera.

His nappies reek of myrrh and frankincense.
And with a shirred gaze he stares often
beyond my shoulder in awe. If I could turn
fast as light, I know I would see the Virgin

waiting for the moment to speak, to intone
on the will of her Son; on what I should say
when I call on the Queen or summon
David Cameron or when Francois Hollande

seeks out my counsel. Then I will need no horses.
A helicopter gunship will be my chariot
and I will venture forth to dispense
God’s indubitable works.    

My Advice on the Four Best Ways to Fuck-up Your Own Poetry Reading

1        Make like it's 1983

Strange to think it, but there are still poets out there who deliver their poems in a monotonous monotone. Most of them tend to be over fifty years of age. Last century (literally) it was de rigeur to give a poetry reading in a monotone – I guess it was a reaction against the way many actors can mangle a poem as they declaim it. Most poets hate the way most actors read poetry. Somebody wise once observed that most poets, when saying a poem aloud, do so by moving from consonant to consonant whereas most actors move from vowel to vowel. Jeremy Irons is a lovely man but he is the stereotypical example of an actor who knows how to destroy a poem, especially one by Yeats, by stretching out every vowel like a dog’s yowl. Anyhow last century the way most poets mitigated against this particular trauma was to put no feeling at all or variation of tone into the public reading of a poem. To inject feeling into a poem was believed to get between the audience and the poem; to impose an interpretation. It was believed by many that if you delivered a poem in a monotone the audience could concentrate specifically on the words and react in their own chosen way as they might by absorbing words straight off the page.

Famously Paul Celan met with sneering disapproval when he read his poems in the traditional Eastern European shamanistic style (with feeling) to a group of German poets in Hamburg in 1952. One observer said Celan had sounded just like Goebbels, another said he sounded like he was singing in the synagogue. Amazingly, this attitude to reading poetry was not confined by the borders of Germany – it was fairly common throughout the English-speaking world too and was the most dominant reading style right up to the beginning of this century.

Slam and performance poetry shook the whole scene up – demonstrating how large audiences would react better to a bit of life in your voice as you declaimed your poem. Sadly there are still older poets who make it like it’s 1983 – often brilliant, insightful, exciting poets on the page who destroy their own reputations as soon as they open their mouths in a crowded auditorium – these days even frequent readers of poetry, even gifted, sophisticated younger ‘page’ poets no longer possess the ability to ‘read’ a poem aurally in a monotone. Monotone poets rarely receive repeat invitations to read and curators elsewhere get to hear how boring they sound and drop them from their thoughts too.

2       Go over time

Nothing causes a festival or reading series curator to get more easily incensed than going over time. The more over time you go the more incensed they will be. Going way over time at a poetry reading is as offensive as pulling down your pants and defecating on stage. If you are reading before other poets you are eating into their time, you are upsetting a very carefully planned programme, you are displaying contempt for the audience, your fellow performers and the person who afforded you a time slot in the first place. It is always best to get off the stage leaving the audience wishing they heard more from you because once they no longer feel that, you have delivered too much of yourself and have overstayed your welcome. Aside from just not caring what you do and how it can impinge on other people there  appear to be three main reasons why people go overtime:

1       a)      The poet who thinks “They love me – I should stay up here all night.” – A dangerous delusion.

2       b)      The poet who thinks  “Shit, they hate what I have read so far – if I keep reading, one of my poems will eventually persuade them what a genius I am. “  - A dangerous delusion  

                 C) The poet who lives in a different space-time continuum. This person knows that he has only twenty minutes to read, fully intends to keep within that time limit but because he really isn’t present on this planet is deluded into believing three minutes is only a minute long – he has failed to take the advice to plan out his programme, time the duration of each poem so that his list can be completed within the allotted time OR he does, but fails to take into consideration the huge amount of time he takes up with introductions and explanations which brings us onto the third best way to fuck-up your poetry reading.

3 Do an introduction like that parodied by Dennis O’Driscoll. 

Some poets do wonderful introductions. Some poets do introductions that are way better and more entertaining than their poems – this has led others who don’t have the same talent to attempt to emulate them. They usually end up sounding like the poet parodied in Denis O’Driscoll’s poem The Next Poem.

4 Spend the whole reading avoiding all your best poems

I have been amazed the number of times I have seen poets decide to avoid reading their best poems. I once published a book by a brilliant poet. The book included much anthologised and discussed poems. But by the time the book was published the poet was bored of them himself. He decided to read the poems in the book which were never anthologised or widely discussed - the audience was left underwhelmed.  On another occasion a very famous American poet came to read in Ireland for the first time to a large audience. The audience was divided in three 1) people who were familiar with his work, loved his work and knew he was genius 2) people who had heard he was supposed to be genius but hadn't encountered the work before and came to find out what all the fuss was about 3) people who knew nothing about him at all. The famous American poet decided on that night to present himself to a completely strange audience by avoiding all the poems which had made him famous and beloved. Three months before he had acquired a new dog; was head over heels in love with dog. Had written a twenty poem sequence about the new dog. These were the only poems he read all night. All three sections of the audience were left very disappointed. I also came across a poet who read poems  about his cat all night - he was a far better poet than his cat poems but it just goes to show you don't need to be a dog lover to fuck-up your own poetry reading.

Young Irish Poets Issue of Poetry Chicago

I greatly enjoyed guest-editing this issue of Poetry. Below are links to various associated media.

The magazine itself

The official magazine podcast

Discussion Guide to issue on Poetry Foundation Site

My article about the issue in the Irish Times

Don Share's article about the issue in the Irish Times

Don and myself talk about the issue on Irish radio beginning at 17.25 minutes into the programme

Reading lists of some of the contributors including myself

How I met Roy Keane

This article was first published in the Cork Evening Echo in 2006

I hate sports. There’s no more succinct way of putting it. Whenever sports comes on the television I change the channel. I dump the sports supplements of newspapers straight in the bin. Sometimes I feel guilty  for the waste of paper, the sacrifice some tree has made and I try to pass it on to somebody else. Last Sunday I noticed two squad cars parked outside the newsagent, I started to dump the supplements I never read: the driving section, the travel pages, the property supplement and the appointments advert section. I pause before dumping the sports section. I tap on the squad car’s window and ask the vigilant Garda Siocana inside if he would like it as I never read it. He politely refuses. I wonder has he turned it down because 1) he prefers to read the sports supplement from a different paper 2) he doesn’t want to fraternize with civilians 3) he thinks I’m trying to chat him up and doesn’t want to encourage me 4) he is just like me and hates sport. Somehow I think the last option is the least likely.

I know I am not alone in being a straight man who hates sport but I also know I’m in a definite miniscule minority.

Everywhere I go I’m interrogated with: Whatchya think o’ the match bouyyy? There was a match? I reply. My only inkling that Scotland were playing Ireland recently was when there was a news story dealing with the chagrin of Scottish fans having to drink in a smoke-free pub. But exactly what were they fans of? Soccer? Hockey? Tiddley winks? I had no idea. Many people are astonished at my level of ignorance but it’s amazing how much of this kind of thing can pass you by when you don’t read the back pages of the newspaper and switch TV channels as soon as Tony O’Donoghue comes on the telly. Not that I have anything against Tony O’Donoghue. I went to school with the guy and know he can be really interesting when he isn’t talking about games which involve balls or fields of crew-cut grass painted with white lines.

About twelve years ago I met Roy Keane and I had no idea who he was. I was working in a bookshop at the time. Late one weekday evening when there weren’t too many customers I was approached at the desk by this really fit-looking young man with a marvelous Cork accent. He radiated a peculiar vibe. Academically, it’s interesting how I understood exactly what that vibe meant because I had never really come across it before. The vibe meant: I don’t know who you are but you obviously know who I am. Now I have to make it clear there was nothing arrogant or caca-headed about this vibe. The young man couldn’t have been more pleasant, well-mannered or respectful. Any parent would be proud of the demeanour of this young man, but there was the unmistakable presumption on his part that I knew who he was. Of course I hadn’t a clue.  I thought to myself, well, if he’s that famous and I haven’t a clue who he is, he must be a sportsman. At that stage I had no idea that any Cork man played for a major English soccer team so I presumed he must have been a member of the Cork Hurling or Football team. I’ve since learned who he was of course. Roy Keane is now iconic, literally ( a photograph of him hangs in the Crawford Municipal Gallery, the same photo will feature on the cover of an Irish poetry journal in June) and he appears on all sorts of non-sports news stories. Plus I have to admit, in spite of everything, some atavistic tribalist compulsion made sure I took an interest in Ireland’s participation in the last two world cups – all without reading the back pages of newspapers mind.

Generally I get very peeved when sports stories start appearing on the front pages of newspapers – don’t the feckers have enough space at the back I reason.

Occasionally sport impinges in a pleasurable way on my life. Theo Dorgan, the Cork poet, has written a very good poem about some hurler who, funnily enough has the same name as the bridge next to the Opera House. In the poem he discusses the legendary skill of this apparently famous hurler. What’s most impressive to me of course is the poetic skill with which Dorgan describes the hurler.

Another pleasurable sporting experience was when I walked into a pub in Barrack Street and noticed all the male customers staring at the television set like zombies. I looked to see what was so hypnotic and got hooked myself. It was the middle of Wimbledon and there was this very nice looking young woman making all sorts of interesting movements across the screen. Soon a pair of names flashed up. One I’ve forgotten forever, the other etched itself onto my brain: Anna Kournikova. I don’t think there were too many tennis fans in the pub that day. I’ve since learnt Anna Kournikova isn’t actually a good tennis player, however I didn’t learn it from Tony O’Donoghue or the back pages of a newspaper.

Dermot Healy R.I.P.

The last time I introduced Dermot Healy in 2012 he was so taken with what I said, he asked for a copy of it afterwards.  As a tribute to him on the occasion of his shocking, untimely death. I reproduce it here:

It’s 27 years since I first introduced Dermot Healy to a Cork audience. He had by that stage published two books, a collection of Short Stories Banished Misfortune and a novel Fighting with Shadows. What attracted me to him back then, through his collection of stories was a demonstrated commitment to real storytelling without compromising on the side of art. Here was a writer who wanted to entertain while at the same time losing no sight of the fact, that language is no mere conveyance for stories or ideas but an entity in and of itself which requires proper attention and manipulation. Right from the beginning he has written in a way which combines a realist’s appreciation of the actual, true experience of the various social milieus he has been a part of, with a poet’s appreciation that truth is often better conveyed through the methodology of myth and described through metaphor. The business of writing, by which I mean Creative Writing, used to  sit uneasily with the academic faculties of university English Departments during the 80's and when I invited Dermot Healy, in my capacity as an undergraduate auditor of the English Literature Society to UCC  in 1985 their reaction was a “Who he?”
I’m delighted to say no one can now say “Who he?” about Dermot Healy. But Dermot had to wait another decade before he achieved commercial success with A Goat’s Song in 1994. Not that he had been silent in the ten years between the publication of his first and second novels. In that time he published his first collection of poetry with the Gallery Press, produced several plays including a screenplay for Cathal Black’s Our Boys.

He is also one of those writers who has spent much time working hard for the benefit of other writers  -  through his editorship of the journal Force 10 and his curatorship of the literary festival of the same name. He is also a generous sharer of his wisdom and knowledge as a writer through the many workshops he provides, regularly in his own community and occasionally at festivals up and down the country. In short, Dermot Healy’s success as a writer not only stems from his genius but through hard work and hard living, persevering especially through the early years against the uninterest and lack of appreciation a writer of demonstrable genius can encounter.

All together he has now published four novels, a collection of short stories, five poetry collections produced over ten plays and been involved in several film projects. Over thirty years after he first started publishing short stories and winning Hennessy Awards Dermot Healy still demonstrates a commitment to entertain without compromising his integrity with language and it is for that reason we are a very lucky audience to be able to hear him here tonight.

Ambush Review (soldiers not included)

I’m delighted to have a poem in the latest Ambush Review. Ambush is a San Francisco based journal which comes out, miraculously, once a year without state subvention. It appears to be funded wholly through advertising and sales. Ambush is a handsome production which always includes full colour art work interspersed between the poems. 

All of the artwork in this issue is taken from comic book artists and there is an article on comic books by Brendan Cahill who is the designer behind the journal. It contains poems by Bay Area luminaries such as Maxine Chernoff and Jack Hirschman. There are translations from the Chinese, Vietnamese and Mexican Spanish. Linda Norton, a leading light in San Francisco’s Irish-American literary community, has a wonderful essay in verse entitled ‘Begin in Blue’. 

My poem is called ‘Face’ and is set in the Buddhist retreat in Tassajara, in the mountains south of Carmel and Monterey. And I get a chance in the bio notes to assert the fact that I am of Californian descent. Some years ago I had great fun going to a church in the Noe Valley and declaring in my thickest Irish brogue: “I’m here to look up my roots!” Bob Booker and Patrick Cahill are the editors and they are sympathetic to submissions from across the globe. I submitted ‘Face’ about this time last year. Issue four isn’t yet featured on their website but extracts from the first three issues are and submission details can be found on http://ambushreview.com/sub

Judge's Summation for 2014 O'Donoghue Prize Winners

Click here to read the winning poems

There were nearly 1700 entries in this year's competition. Our bank had announced it could no longer process American, Australian or Canadian cheques for us so we could accept payment from overseas only through Paypal and this definitely led to a slightly lower number of entries than in previous years. Strong poems stood out easily from the rest through the sureness and authority of the poet's voice. There were more poems deserving of a shortlisting than I had space on the shortlist for so I added  another stratification of acknowledgement this year "Highly Commended" as distinct from "Shortlisted" and "Commended". Basically, highly commended poems were just as accomplished as many of the poems on the shortlist but lost out on a shortlisting due to the vagaries of my personal taste on decision day. Something else I noticed this year is that while a competition is always won by an individual poem, the authority of an overall submission can help an individual poem across the finish line and many of the finest poems shortlisted and highly commended this year were accompanied by other great work in the same submission.

Deciding on a winner in a poetry contest is not an infallible process.  I had difficulty deciding which of these two Maya Catherine Popa (USA) poems should be the winner. Initially I was pulled towards ‘The Bees Have Been Cancelled’ but approaching the deadline for making a decision I swung in favour of ‘Hummingbird’.  Both poems were part of a five poem submission which impressed with its confidence, its authority. Although I recognised the craft and accomplishment in the other three poems they were too discursive for my own particular taste and would never have won the O’Donoghue Prize this year. I mention them here to make a point about the vagaries of taste. Not only does taste play a part in a judge preferring one poet over another, it also plays a part in a particular judge or editor preferring poems over other poems by the same poet.

‘Hummingbird’ contains Ashberrian mysteries. We have no idea what the father is guilty of;  I have no idea what parable goes unfulfilled here, it may be one in common circulation I haven’t heard of yet or it may be one which comprises part of the poet’s own personal mythology, either way I am convinced as a reader of the appropriateness and poetic truth of the statement. An observation of a hummingbird which might merely educate and entertain on a zoological level is lifted onto another plain with the insight that the facts of the bird’s durability can inform the survival tactics of a person in crisis. The last three lines make words describe an experience which cannot be recounted through the language of factual reportage. How do you draw light from a wound? How does it guide the silence afterwards? It takes a skillful poet to convince us of the truth of such statements without us dismissing them as whimsy. I have been convinced.

 ‘The Bees Have Been Cancelled’ is a more straight-forward poem whose music I adore. In spite of it being arranged as a block of prose, it is one of the most musical poems in the competition, with a confident beat and euphonous consonance. It takes risks with language which pay off and surprise such as using ‘currency’ as a verb. Calling a bee an integer is also part of that language skill. Nowhere does the stretching of the language jolt you out of the hum of the poem.

I love the Mahonesque music of Paula Cunningham’s (Northern Ireland)‘The Weather in the Mournes’. That is not to say that the poem is derivative of Derek Mahon but that she exercises the same care for sound as her established Ulster compatriot. She also succeeds in presenting a depiction of the Irish landscape which avoids all the timeworn clichés which lesser hands have mined out of Heaney’s and Kavanagh’s original visions. As in Popa’s poems, assonance, consonance and alliteration have big parts to play here without sounding overworked or strained. The sounds delight the ear as much as the detailed descriptions do the mind’s eye.

Matthew Sweeney’s (Ireland) poem ‘Benito’ is an animal of a different sort from the poems of Popa and Cunningham. Where Popa and Cunningham make language sparkle, Sweeney shows how effective a poetic idiom free of ostentation can be. Like all the top fifty poems ‘Benito’ stood out from most of the submissions through its confidence and authority in language. ‘Benito’ is the sort of poetry which does not get lost in translation.  The language here is fully self-aware with a crafted subtle rhythm to the lines, but conveys its poetic truths in a way which is easily more transferrable to a different lexicon. Where Popa creates poetic truth with newly-coined locutions, Sweeney does it through parable. Where Popa alludes to parable Sweeney presents one whole. The recounting of fully-clothed otter hunting, brandy-swilling, arboreal pissing and trout with Espresso might all seem like mere whimsy if it didn't so skilfully accumulate into a metaphor for making the most of life against the background of unfulfilled promise and abject failure. The things each of us do every day to compensate for disappointment are usually more mundane and less adventurous than swimming after otters, awaking a whole forest with your song or seeking a good espresso to accompany your al fresco trout. Sweeney’s skill in this poem, as in so many of his poems is to address fundamental questions of existence without resort to the language of philosophical query; by reminding us how our ordinary lives mimic in outline the struggles of those with wilder experience. People who say Sweeney’s poems often lack metaphors and similes fail to see the wood for the trees. His poems are metaphors in their entirety.

Cithog is an Irish language term for left-hander. Up to the 1940s or 50s children in Irish schools would have been brutally beaten out of writing with their left hand – made to write with their right hand. Here is a poem by a young poet (Dean Browne, Ireland) who would have entered school in the 90s and who still felt it was an issue even then. The poem skilfully describes the process of laying words on a page old style (though not as old style as nibs and inkwells) and there is an old-fashioned feel to this poem, every word looks comfortable in its place, the syntax is neat and well-behaved unlike the handwriting it describes. In an Irish context it is unavoidable to read allusions to Heaney’s ‘Digging’ in this poem. The simple enough twist in the last two lines and the emotional conflict building up to it lift the poem out of being an example of mere description.

Faizel Deen (Canada) might be an almost namesake of Deane Browne but one can see from his poem that he hails from a completely different world. The language of ‘Museum’ is not neat and well-behaved in an English context. There is a playfulness here which entertains me, the juxtaposition of Western and Asian cultural icons might seem capricious but actually accurately reflects the globalised world we now find ourselves in. In spite of the disordered lineation not a word seems out of place.

Mark Fiddes’s (UK)  ‘Another Gravity’ won me over despite some of the rhymes being a little too familiar. I swallowed “honey” with “money” and “sweet” with “eat” because I liked “hers” with “saboteurs” and “sewn” with “stone”. English is such a rhyme-poor language it’s difficult to write a compelling, readable poem as well ordered as this one, but Fiddes avoids creating just another example of verbal topiary with his narrative and descriptive skills and his ability to turn such wonderful locutions such as “the shaded wall of a dream” and “harlequin tartan of our past”; the air thickening with the static of hate etc.

James Hughes’s (Australia) “The Breath in Things” is a poem which shares a marvelous delight in the music of words. Right from the beginning we know we are in the hands of a master word musician with “a scorched /Horse picked at scarce grass”. Hughes doesn't need end rhymes to prove his musical ear. Here we have a poem not of argument or narrative but of memories and sense impressions linked loosely in a way reader’s intuition assures us is right and unified also by the consistency of an authoritative voice.

Ian McEwen’s (UK) ‘In the Bottle’ delighted me with its music and skillful use of repetition as a device. The most successful song-like poem in the whole competition.

Nuala Ni Chonchuir’s (Ireland) ‘Juno Refuses to Look at Warhol’ builds up to the poetic insight often revealed through the fresh perspective of a child’s eye. Derek Mahon composed a two liner based on his infant daughter’s observation of sunlight reflected on a ceiling. Here Ni Chonchuir spins a charming narrative.

Meghann Plunkett’s (USA) ‘Eve’ parable is composed of language as gritty and robust as its conclusion. The rhythm and cadences of the poem are well measured.

Theadora Siranian’s (USA)‘Hitler’s Bathtub’ was one of a compelling four poem sequence submitted concerning the second world war photography of Lee Miller. As strong as all the poems were, this one worked best on its own – a wonderful example of how visual art can inspire poetry.

Mark Wagenaar’s (USA) ‘Broken Sonnet: Last Sketch’ - a strong rhythm beats through the arteries of these lines. The poem’s (broken) non-sentences subvert the expectations of tradition which the sonnet form evokes, much like how De Chirico’s surrealism subverted his classically proportioned paintings. 

2013/14 Gregory O'Donoghue Prize Results

There were nearly 1700 entries this year. I will be issuing a judge's statement later. Congratulations to all mentioned here and a big thanks from me and the Munster Literature Centre to everyone who entered whose entry fees pay for the prizes and other programmes which benefit writers and poets.

1^st Maya Catherine Popa, New York, USA for ‘Hummingbird’ (1000 euro)
2^nd Paula Cunningham, Belfast, Northern Ireland for ‘The Weather in the Mournes’ (500 euro)
3^rd Matthew Sweeney, Cork, Ireland for ‘Benito’ (250 euro)

Short Listed (all shortlisted poems will be published later this year in Southword, and will receive a publication fee of 30 euro)

Dean Browne, Cork, Ireland for ‘Cithóg’
Faizal Deen, Ontario, Canada for ‘Museum’
Mark Fiddes, London, UK for ‘Another Gravity’
James Hughes, Melbourne, Australia for ‘The Breath in Things’
Ian McEwen, Bedford, UK for ‘In the Bottle’
Nuala Ní Chonchúir, Galway, Ireland for ‘Juno Refuses to Look at Warhol’
Meghann Plunkett, New York, USA for ‘Eve’
Maya Catherine Popa, New York, USA for ‘The Bees Have Been Cancelled’
Theodora Siranian, Massachusetts,USA for ‘Hitler’s Bathtub’
Mark Wagenaar, Texas, USA for ‘Broken Sonnet: Last Sketch’


Highly Commended

J T Barbarese, USA
Judith Barrington, USA
Maria Isakova Bennett, UK
Brian M. Biggs, USA
Danielle Blau, USA
Charlotte Buckley, UK
Elaine Cosgrove, Ireland
Vanessa Couto Johnson, USA
Michael Farry, Ireland
Liz Gallagher, Spain
Victoria Kennefick, Ireland
Peter Kent, UK
Aisha Kishore, Isle of Man
Dave Lordan, Ireland
David McLaughlin, Ireland
Michael G. Rather, USA
Frank Russo, Australia
Rachael Pettus, Cyprus
Martin Sharry, Ireland
Lorna Shaughnessy, Ireland







Commended

Opal Palmer Adisa, Virgin Islands
LJ Allen, USA
Betsy Aoki, USA
Eric Berlin (no address)
C. Wade Bentley USA
David Butler, Ireland
Angela T. Carr, Ireland
Alvey Carragher, Ireland
A. Chakrabarti, France
Sarah Clancey, Ireland
Geraldine Clarkson UK
Tim Collins, Australia
Craig Cotter, USA
Maurice Devitt, Ireland
Michael Dooley, Ireland
James Faucette, USA
John Fitzgerald, Ireland
Kevin Foley, Ireland
Caroline Glen, Australia
Frank Golden, Ireland
Thomas Heffernan, USA
Niamh Hehir, Ireland
Michael Herron, Ireland
Tania Hershman, UK
Nancy Hoffman, USA
Eleanor Hooker, Ireland
Caoilinn Hughes, New Zealand
Janet Joyner, USA
Alisha Kaplan, USA
Susan Kelly, Ireland
Noel King, Ireland
Simon Lewis, Ireland
Michael McCarthy UK
Aifric McGlinchey, Ireland
B. McClatchey, USA
Michael McKimm, UK
Jim Maguire, Ireland
Eamon Mag Uidhir, Ireland
Madeleine Mac Namara, Ireland
Orla Martin, Ireland
Kim Moore, UK
Tom Moore, Ireland
Paddy Moran, Ireland
Judith Neale, USA
Jean O’Brien, Ireland
Mary O’Brien, Ireland
Karen O’Connor, Ireland
Hugh O’Donnell, Ireland
Gréagóir Ó Dúil, Ireland
Paul Perry, Ireland
Edward Power, Ireland
Michael Ray, Ireland
Marco Roberto Rinaldi, Italy
Helen Klein Ross, USA
Breda Wall Ryan, Ireland
John W. Sexton, Ireland
Colm Scully, Ireland
Michael Sheehan, Ireland
Laura Shore, Australia
Alison Thompson, Australia
Charles P R Tisdale, USA
Jose Varghese, India
Robert Watson, USA
John Whitworth, UK
Ian Wild, Ireland
Sherraine Pate Williams, USA
Kathleen Willard, USA
Landa Wo, Germany
Charles Wuest, USA

The new Southword (no 25) is online packed full of all sorts of literary goodies such as Molia Dumbleton’s O’Faolain Prize winning story The Way We Carried Ourselves, as well as brilliant stories by Danielle McLoughlin, Kevin Doyle, Ariel Berry, Aoife Fitzpatrick and Gaynell Gavin. There are over thirty great new poems by poets scattered across the globe from America’s West Coast to New York, Canada, Ireland, The United Kingdom, France and Pakistan. There’s also the essential Irish language supplement with new fiction, poems and reviews and a more extensive review section in English focussed on Munster writers.

http://www.munsterlit.ie/Southword/Issues/25/contents.html

Enjoy!

The Problem With Having Every Live Reading Recorded

The problem with having every live reading recorded these days, either in audio or video, is that if you read a new poem, which you have not yet submitted to a journal or a competition, it can get released on the web before the end of the week -   thus invalidating the requirement that the poem be previously unpublished. Most organisers of readings allow you to object to your segment being broadcast/posted, but to object sometimes seems curmudgeonly. It has long been a tradition that a poet could try out new poems on a live audience before submitting them for publication, but this is now becoming increasingly more difficult to do. At the Munster Literature Centre we video record events for archival reasons and if anything ends up on the web it is months or years afterwards.

I now NEVER read a poem to a live audience unless it has already been published.

Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry 2013

I am happy to be the recipient of the 2013 Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry. Since the age of twenty I have been finalist for various literary prizes including the Hennessy Awards, The Patrick Kavanagh Award, The Strong Award and the Keats-Shelley on a previous occasion. This is the first time I have actually won something and while at fifty years of age I am not as likely to let my ego run away with itself as it might have done if I had won as a twenty year old; winning is still sweet.
The English novelist Salley Vickers, whose first name derives from her father's admiration for W.B. Yeats, was the judge who generously chose my curiously simple poem 'Madra' (Gaelic/Irish for 'dog') as this year's winner. Congrats too to the runners-up this year Will Kemp and Polly Atkins.
Eleanor Fitzsimons took first prize in the essay category and in the competition's sixteen year history we are the first Irish winners. A link to download my poem can be found here:
http://www.keats-shelley.co.uk/keats-shelley-prize

International Poets in Conversation

International Poets in Conversation Link Here

Ilya Kaminsky very generously invited me to Chicago to record at the Poetry Foundation an "International Poets in Conversation" podcast with a senior Irish poet of my choice. I chose Matthew Sweeney. The podcast series is part of an initiative by the Poetry Foundation to encourage poetry communities across the United States to programme poets from abroad. Our trip to Chicago was contingent on us being able to arrange at least three other readings - which we did in Brooklyn, Seattle, Berkeley and San Francisco. Here you can listen to us discuss Eilean Ní Chuilleanáin and Michael Hartnett among other Irish poets and also talk about the influence 20th Century German poetry had on our own work.
The link brings you to a page which lists previous recordings in the series including the likes of Adam Zagajewski, Kwame Dawes and two of my favourite younger poets - Belarussian Valzhyna Mort and German poet Jan Wagner who is Sweeney's translator. Also listed on the same page are recordings by American poets such as Philip Levine, Mark Doty and Eavan Boland.

Patrick Cotter Interview

Photo: Phoebe Wong September 2013

QUESTIONS FOR PATRICK COTTER, Poezija magazine, Zagreb, autumn 2013.
Interviewer:Damir Šodan

Charles Simic, American poet of Serbian origin, whom we both know, already announced in his book The World Doesn't End (1989) that "the time of minor poets is coming", those "whose fame will never reach beyond" their "closest family..."! Do you agree with the premise that perhaps "the golden age" of poetry is behind us, bearing in mind the incredible proliferation of the written word on the Net and the tsunami of various information rushing towards us every day? Will "blogetry" eventually replace "poetry"?

No. I would disagree that the golden age of poetry is behind us. With increasing literacy and greater educational opportunities in the world more and more people are coming to poetry – of course in a world with a population of nine billion those with a vested interest in poetry will always remain a minority but they are not dying away and new generations are not any less talented than the generations which have preceded them. Bad poetry has always been with us and always will be. I don’t just mean mediocre poetry or failed poetry written by committed practitioners but the sort of verse written by people who never read poetry. The internet initially gave bad poetry a higher profile but in the last decade many internet outlets for excellent poetry, exercising rigorous editorial control, have proliferated. I’m also heartened by the many brilliant, talented young people who emerge into poetry every year like fine wines reaching the market place. But I also believe that Simic may have been commenting here on the fact that the world has so many poets these days that even good poets, not singled out for genius of Nobel proportions, minor poets in other words, can remain unknown beyond the circle of two hundred who constitute their regular readership.

At the Cork Spring Poetry Festival while introducing our friend, American poet Gregory Orr, you mentioned that back in the day -- I think you meant the 80s -- when you discovered him quite by chance -- if I remember correctly -- the situation on the poetry scene in Britain and Ireland was far from inspiring for a young poet. What was the problem and have things changed for the better in the meantime?

What I meant to say was that they were uninspiring for me, personally, as a young poet, with my particular sensibilities. I came to reading adult poetry seriously through discovering the poetry of Gottfried Benn as a fifteen year old. I was excited by a form of poetry which did not depend on syllabics, metre or rhyme for shaping the line and as an adolescent I was also excited by the Gothic subject matter of Benn’s earliest poems – rats in the diaphragm, flowers in the wound, and all that. It led me in a direction via Celan, Rilke, Trakl, Zbigniew Herbert, Transtromer which dragged me further and further away from the tradition of poetry written in these islands. Later I discovered the Americans who had also been influenced by this path such as Gregory Orr, Charles Simic, Stephen Dobyns, Mark Strand and others such as the Californian persona of Thom Gunn and the Ted Hughes of Crow who validated this aesthetic in the English language. When I was young it was a presumption of those in ascendancy that if you wrote like a European it was only because you were technically inept. But I find English a very poor language for rhyming in – most rhymes are predictable and make the language sound hackneyed and unsurprising.  Paul Muldoon has done brilliant work with pararhyme but in a way which is wholly his own and completely inimitable. The Irish poet Derek Mahon manages to write brilliant rhyming poetry by loading his lines with all sorts of other surprises. It is as if his poetry succeeds in spite of his rhymes. On the whole though rhyming in English leads to appalling poetry – and commonly practiced by individuals who have an underdeveloped interest in original subject matter.

Also as a city dweller I found the rural focus of much 70s and 80s Irish poetry wholly uninspiring. I might admire Seamus Heaney as a poet of genius but I never had the same pleasure from reading Heaney that I got from reading Celan, Simic or Herbert. Heaney promulgated the view that it is the purpose of poetry to assuage. I take a diametrically opposing view that it is the purpose of poetry to disconcert. The situation has hugely improved with the latest two generations of British poets under the influence of many of the European and American poets I mentioned.

In Ireland it is difficult still because Ireland is so small and it is easier for a small grouping to dominate. Poetry criticism here is totally focused on the subject of poetry’s relevance to Irish history or to feminism. Also, one publisher dominates the scene and this publisher is so ignorant of European poetry that he once described Paul Celan, in writing, as a great 20^th Century Polish poet. I have had significant selections of my work translated into Estonian, Macedonian and Scandinavian languages but my own personal publishing history in Ireland has been on the fringes. Many European poets dream of being translated into English and achieving global fame but the reality is that the world of poetry publishing in English is vast - where it is easy for even a better than competent poet to go completely ignored.

There is quite a lot of humour and wit in your writing. You seem to appreciate -- as Leonard Cohen said when commenting on the Beatles' music -- the seriousness of the light-hearted approach! Is that something spontaneous in your case or are you consciously applying a certain effort there not to perhaps come across as too "heavy"?

Well, I never play for laughs. Any humour in my work emerges organically out of my absurdist outlook. If you write for laughs you end up with jokes not poetry and the problem with jokes is that they are not open to multiple interpretations. All great art is open to multiple interpretations and so too should anything which aspires to be art such as the poetry of even minor poets.

For me the world is absurd and anyone who fails to see that is failing to look at reality through their own eyes – they are buying into the prefabricated reality of others. The absurd naturally inspires laughter as a response, but not everyone laughs in the same place as with a joke. I believe humour in literature is a serious business. As Kundera demonstrated in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting humour can be an effective weapon against those who would choose to wield power through lies. Charles Simic has time and again argued that humour is an effective conveyance for edifying thought. Every life has its tragedies but mine are not in the order of a Celan or a Mandalstam. I could not convey their seriousness as plausibly as they do. I once thought the only way to write poetry was as Celan did. But I have not led the life which would allow me to write like Celan. It is part of a writer’s maturing to accept the writer he is rather than strive to be the writer he isn’t. So no, I have no deliberate strategy to avoid coming across as “heavy”. Lightness in being is the cross I must bear however unbearable others deem it to be.

I learned in Ireland that more and people are inclined to write in Gaelic, or Irish Gaelic language. I have personally met some authors who are capable of producing verse in it on a fairly satisfactory artistic level, such as Aifric Mac Aodha, or Paul Casey who told me about it over a couple of beers and since I don't know Gaelic, I have to take that his word on this. Where does this renewed interest in tradition come from in your opinion?   

For a long time the Irish language was the property of the extreme reactionaries who ran this country, who raped our children and hugged all the wealth to themselves, forcing generation after generation who might have brought about change to emigrate. The Roman Catholic Church once held a hegemonic position in Irish society analogous to the Communist Party in Central and Eastern Europe; the Irish language in the national education system was one of its tools for asserting that hegemony.

Things started to change in the 1980s when a new generation of Irish language poets came to prominence – a generation who would naturally have been disposed to being counter-authority. Also, many people not associated with the Catholic Church, the leading political parties and the high-paid mandarin civil service class began to reclaim the language for themselves and set up their own schools devoid of child rapists and cultural fascists. That rescuing of the language is manifesting itself now through a second generation of talented poets writing in Irish.

Over the years you were involved in the organisation of many literary festivals. Why do you think they are important, especially when it comes to poets? My Lithuanian colleague Eugenijus Ališanka believes that poets need a bit of reassurance and encouragement in a world that is primarily driven by the forces of capital and general pragmatism. He feels poetry festivals are places where poets can share some of their frustrations and exhilarations when it comes to writing something as 'useless' as poetry. I'm caricaturing it a bit, but nevertheless, what do you think?

Literary Festivals can be very beneficial when they take the shape described by Ališanka, and that is how I try to shape the festivals I curate and produce, where poets can meet one another and present one another with translation and travel opportunities and most importantly of all present to one another different ways of making a poem. Literary festivals are essential for enabling small nations to export their culture and identity. Culture is an effective tool of international diplomacy and poetry has been very effectively used by us Irish in gaining a foothold in China (I have edited the only anthology of foreign contemporary poetry translated and published in mainland China). The co-operative ventures between us and Chinese writers demonstrated trust and mutual respect and have led to closer relations between civil servants in both countries.

But I know of many literary festivals where the writer is treated merely as a commodity to attract the paying public through the door. They are invited to town, made to perform, paid and then shooed away before they cost any more money. This is a greater problem for festivals featuring novelists and memoirists than for specialist poetry festivals.  Another feature of literary festivals which host writers from many countries is that they are almost all in receipt of heavy government funding. In the USA where literary festivals rarely receive state funding very few writers from abroad are featured. The Americans can usually only afford to feature American writers (often without paying them or covering their expenses) encouraging a very insular, inward-looking culture where, outside the universities and major institutes, hardly anyone is paid well and everything is fairly amateur. I’m not a fan of funding culture primarily through capricious, private-sector charity (philanthropy – right-wing extremists call it, to distort the truth). I believe government funding is the only sustainable effective means.

You mentioned in our correspondence that you are a big fan of Richard Brautigan and that it's a pity that he has become largely forgotten. What's there in Brautigan that still appeals to you as both reader and creative writer?

Brautigan’s absurdist aesthetic appeals to me greatly still and in parts of his novels I think he has written poetry which will endure (particularly in Sombrero Fallout). Brautigan is a better poet writing in prose than he ever was working in verse. The protagonist of Dreaming of Babylon is as tragic and as beset by existential problems as any protagonist of Beckett’s. Brautigan has been missold as an elaborate jokester – disappointing people who seek situation comedy and keeping away readers of serious literature.

A dull and obvious question: when and how did you start writing poetry? Who were your early influences? 

As a nine year old my school class was asked to try to write a poem – the only time in thirteen years of school and by the only teacher who never beat a boy. I was surprised by what I wrote; a little poem about a witch and a mouse which rhymes. My enemies might claim it remains the best poem I’ve written. When I started to write seriously in my teens ... well I’ve already told you about that above.

And finally, W.H. Auden once famously said that "poetry makes nothing happen". Why do people still do it - write poetry?  

Because football is so boring.

But more seriously, Auden said this in the context of disowning his own poem ‘September 1939’. That statement had more to do with Auden trying to justify the revising of his own past and early oeuvre than anything else. It has often been seized upon by the enemies of poetry, but not exclusively. I think it was requoted by Paul Muldoon regarding the appropriateness or otherwise of politically-committed poetry in the context of Northern Ireland. Brecht’s poems did not prevent the destruction of Europe by Hitler. Mandalstam’s poetry did not prevent the destruction of Europe by Stalin. But those facts do not negate the value of either poet. Poetry can make plenty happen in the soul and saves lives that way.

Over Twenty-Five Million

In 2008 the National Endowment for the Arts in the USA announced that 92% of Americans had read no poetry in the previous twelve months. Some people repeated this fact as if to suggest that poetry was no longer a vital cultural force.
8% of the US population amounts to twenty-five and a half million people - over four times the number of Jews eliminated in the Holocaust.
If the Tea Party had its way all the tax dollars paid to facilitate the making and reading of poetry would be with-held. These people think nothing of creating a cultural holocaust and would dismiss the dozens of millions of people who think otherwise as an historical irrelevance.

What good is poetry to the economy?

In the 21st Century, age of austerity, state funding for culture is coming under increasing attack from right-wing economists who, to quote (as you know) Oscar Wilde, “know the cost of everything but the value of nothing”.

Most poets know all or part of the following quote from President John F. Kennedy



“When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.”

Not everyone knows the rest of the speech which was given in honour of Robert Frost after his death.

The context for the quote can be found here:

http://www.arts.gov/about/Kennedy.html

Kennedy begins by saying:

“Our national strength matters, but the spirit which informs and controls our strength matters just as much.”

I believe that this is as an effective an argument in favour of poetry as any other. A strong economy may contribute to national strength but poetry contributes to the national spirit without which that strength is meaningless. In this consumerist age it’s a common mistake by some to expect poetry (and all human endeavours) to contribute to the economy. But the fact that poetry contributes to the national spirit ought to be justification enough for society to contribute economically to poetry.  For while the spirit may be divorced from the market place, the bodies which are inhabited by the spirit need physical sustenance. Society needs to make economic sacrifices for her poets because poets make economic sacrifices on behalf of society by choosing poetry over more venal & profitable pursuits.

Incidentally Kennedy made this speech about six hours before I was born (two weeks premature) after midnight, Irish time, October 27th 1963 - I heard his call

Gerald Stern and Graf Van Aefferden

Today I was reading the poems of the Pittsburgh Jew, Gerald Stern, whom I had once met, several years ago. His distinctive, cantor’s voice rung in my head as I read - and I took so much joy from his words and from the personality revealed through his words that I couldn’t help thinking again of Count Van Aefferden and the bitterness which had twisted his brain and curled his lips towards the end of his life.

I had served him a number of times as a bookseller and had always been struck by his good manners, curious of his German aristocratic title “Graf” coupled with the Dutch “Van”. His accent in English was unmistakably German – a language I had adored and had taught myself to a feeble leaving cert standard, spurred on by my love of the writings of Kafka and Paul Celan.

I remember the bizarre experience of my first time in a cake shop in Konstanz in 1983. How odd it seemed to use a language which had up to then been holy for me, because of its association with the poems of Paul Celan, how odd it seemed to use it for the daily commerce of purchasing pastries and so, words which had always seemed holy, seemed now as greasy as the brown pfennigs sliding about in the till.

Later, in my bookseller days I was always curious about German customers and spriched a few words ein paar worter with them whenever I could. The Graf became fond of me, appearing, in retrospect now, to overlook my black hair, my brown eyes. He must have been approaching 80 at the beginning of this century, his hair in a silver sidecrease, his blue eyes too rheumy to be ice-like.  His diminutiveness, the way he wore his hair, his kind of glasses, his gentleness all reminded me of my mother’s father – the dead grandfather I still loved, even after he curiously denied the Jewish heritage all the family was proud of.

After a number of pleasant encounters, one day the Graf came looking for Thomas Kenneally’s Schindler’s Ark.

I’m looking for Schindler’s Ark,” he announced, “I’ve looked in the history section but cannot find it."
I told him how it was written in the form of a novel so we kept it in the fiction section.

“Ah the fiction section”, he said. “Of course that’s where it belongs.” He spoke in a playful tone of voice, but the words raised the hair on the back of my neck. My front was turned to him and I genially asked:

“Oh so do you think the Schindler story is a little over-romanticised?”
“Oh yes,yes,yes,yes,yes,” he said.
“So you don’t believe it’s all true?”
“Oh, No. No,no,no,no.”
“Which parts do you think are untrue?”
“Oh all of it.”
“All of it?”
“Yes all of it.”

I knew if I revealed my true feelings he would stop revealing his real opinions.

“So you don’t believe in the holocaust?”
“Oh no.”
“You don’t believe six million Jews died?”
“Oh no not six million”.
I thought of the Bible's words ‘To save one man is to save the world’ which I had learned from the writings of Isaac Bashevis Singer.

“Of course if just one million died that would still be quite a lot.” I said.
“After the war there was hunger there was typhus, people were dropping like flies,” he said.
“So you don’t believe there were gas chambers or ovens?”
“How could there have been ovens? There was not enough coal to burn in German homes. Zyklon-B was for exterminating lice – I myself was gassed with Zyklon-B. It’s just a story made up after the war so Israel could get money out of the Fatherland.”

He denied the holocaust so reasonably, dismissed the Shoah so lightly as one does a fairytale after all your milk teeth have gone.

“I myself was in a camp.” He said.
“You?” I said.
“Yes until 1948.”
“In the Soviet zone?” I asked.
“No the British zone.”

I wondered to myself what class of criminal the British kept locked up for three years after the war had ended. He said the war had been terrible for him. He bewailed his stolen youth. As Leonard Cohen might have asked where were the horns? How come no green saliva?  I asked him if he had fought on the Eastern Front. He said, no, the Western Front. I asked him what branch of the Wehrmacht he had fought with. He said the parachute regiment. I asked him if he had fought in Crete and he shook his head and seemed evasive in body language. The conversation came to an end.

I maintained the professional relationship that day, the habit of years of needing to, before the various varieties of monster which presented themselves in the guise of customer. But he was soon returning to me with leaflets printed by neo-Nazi groups. Months passed and he became more agitated, his personality was affected. One day he asked a colleague to show him an encyclopaedia. As she did so a page fell open on Einstein and the Graf’s index finger swooped on Einstein’s photograph like a Stuka.

“This book is no good that man is a Jew!”

After that I maintained no front and presented my raised hackles to him. One day he wanted to order a book only available in America. The chainstore I worked for was going through a period when orders to America were curtailed. I told him I couldn’t get it for him. When he protested I said there was nothing I could do, I was only following orders. He persisted several times I repeated the phrase ‘I’m only following orders,’ until he declaimed:

“I am a good customer of here.”

 A crowd had gathered, confidentially I gathered him close to my face and uttered softly, so softly: “Ja, aber wir haben auch viele gute Kunden die Juden sind.” (Yes but we also have many good customers who are Jews.)
He looked as if he were in the early stages of spontaneous combustion. After that day I never saw him again.  I went through several stages of grief with him, astonishment, anger, hatred. Today so many years later, reading the poems of Gerald Stern, drinking in Stern's affability, I pitied the Graf Van Aefferden, pitied him that he should deny himself such simple joys in life all because he hated Jews.  

What true Mensch could dislike Gerald Stern or deny himself the pleasure of his poems?

Cork Spring Poetry Festival 2013

 

 

I am very excited to have sent to the printers the brochure for the 2013 Cork Spring Poetry Festival. You can be the first to view a web version by clicking here (2.2mb).

 

The line up includes readings by 34 poets.  Among the headliners are Carolyn Forché from the USA, Gwyneth Lewis from Wales, Karen Solie from Canada, Håken Sandell from Sweden. Nine countries are represented. There will be discussions with the poets after many of the readings. There will be workshops including masterclasses with Forche and Lewis, a craft talk with Karen Solie and a video showing thirty poets each reading a poem from festivals past.

 

You have two chances of being on this line-up.



First chance:  win the Gregory O'Donoghue International Poetry Prize.

Second chance: If you are a poet with a track record of publication in periodicals but have not yet published a first, full-length collection, you can apply for one of up to five "Prebooked" reading slots. You will have the opportunity to read three poems of 40 lines or under.

You must have at least two magazine publishing credits. Submit three poems with a biographical note. Submissions will be accepted by email before January 8th to munsterlit@eircom.net

Submissions must have the subject heading "Prebooked Poetry Reading 2013".
The list of chosen poets will be posted on www.munsterlit.ie by January 20th and later on www.corkpoetryfest.net