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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction to poetry reading Shanghai March 14th 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gregory Orr, Palm Beach Poetry Festival and Restoration Topiary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be continued……
Read more on Orr here

Angel Patriot

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

(from Making Music, forthcoming 2009)

Millions Poet

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

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

Poetry Brothel

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

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

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

Arguments

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

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

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

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

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

Answers not on a postcard please.

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

Destroy Philip Levine's Blue Collar Halo

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

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

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

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