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Twitlonger here from the Secretariat NCFA
National Recovery Plan , Impact on the Arts in Ireland
Fianna Fáil /Green and the Arts in Ireland
Western Writer’s Centre Appeal , Petition and letters
Reiterating whatever claim it makes,
A sotto voce repetition, rain plays out
a reverie-inducing music on the glass
harmonica of the kitchen’s window pane.
But peeling open the back door
for a rain check, you hear the liquid
swishing grow insistent as a whip;
sibiliant drips insinuate their way
between tightly packed leaves which,
gorging on these waters , never
quite reach saturation point.
hard to imagine that sweetness
and light might yet triumph,
a freshly perfumed day resurface,
put on airs of mellowness,
a rose-tinted sun assume the contours
of a mountain range, your gable wall.
by Dennis O Driscoll
Dennis O Driscoll , ‘Reality Check’. Publ Anvil Press 2007.
The title of this small post and book recommendation is somewhat misleading, the post is not wholly about Patrick Kavanagh‘s poetry. I have been reading No Earthly Estate in conjunction with poetry by Padraic Colum and Eithne Strong during this week. Having today published a poem by Eithne Strong, and indeed there a few of the Poet’s Circuits (Padraic Colum) on Poethead, I decided to link these posts at the end of this short piece about earthly estates, land, and language .
Given the appalling situation that Irish Arts are in due to a combination of short-termism and the inclusion of a blasphemy amendment into our legislation this year (2010) , I thought to add in the sometimes robust words of artists whose relation to words, landscape and the soil have accompanied me this week in awful weather. I will draw attention to the new links and imprints on the Poethead front page, which are a celebration of the small independent presses, their poets and their bloggers. These writers and presses have an honesty and expression that just about anchors one in the storm of drivel that forms the political approach to Irish Arts, that seems wholly dedicated to the destruction of the root of arts in Ireland. Regular readers of the blog are aware of the problems, which include the Arts Act 2003 , the savage planning system, which is not balanced with legislation dedicated to conservation, the blasphemy amendment, and the insidious cuts to independent Writer’s Centres, who work very hard to nurture literature and avant-garde web usage.
The wordsmiths mentioned above , Kavanagh, Strong and Colum are but a tiny example of the triumph of art and literature against what amounts to a repressive and regressive approach to the arts. They are not contemporary poets but provide for the new writer the amazing root-system which forms Irish Literature in all its wonderousness. Would only that those who claim to lead us politically were aware of their cultural heritage , story-telling, and indeed the violence of words that make up this rich history of multifaceted voice and poetry !
by Patrick Kavanagh.
I met the devil too,
and the adjectives by which I would describe him are these:
Solemn,
Boring,
Conservative.
He was a man the world would appoint to a Board,
He would be on the list of invitees for a bishop’s garden-party,
He would look like an artist.
He was the fellow who wrote in newspapers about music,
Got into a rage when someone laughed;
He was serious about unserious things;
You had to be careful about his inferiority complex
For he was conscious of being uncreative.
from , No earthly Estate, God and Patrick Kavanagh . (Ed, Tom Stack . Columba Press , 2004).
Epic
by Patrick Kavanagh .
I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided : who owned
That half-rood of rock , a no-man’s land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffy’s shouting ‘Damn your soul’
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel –
‘Here is the march along these iron stones’
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important ? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind
He said : ‘I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.
Bibliography for ‘No Earthly estate : Patrick Kavanagh , Padraic Colum and Eithne Strong
Whilst reading the Chris Agee edited Poetry (October – November 1995), I happened upon the truly beautiful Mother Ireland, penned by Eavan Boland. I am adding a Boston Globe interview (excerpted) and Eavan Boland link, entitled Exploring Poetry’s ‘Lesser Space‘ to the blog as this week’s Saturday Woman Poet , which is becoming a regular item on the blog. I have included the links to the Saturday Woman Poet archive and tag-set alongside other related links.
The interview is companion to a post that I re-blogged this week , entitled Female Complexities, Dorothy Molloy and fits neatly into the theme of intimacy in writing, as opposed to the monumental writ upon a large-scale canvas poetry beloved of politicians and other uncreative people. Sylvia Plath referred to this celebration of the small, the real and the domestic as a writing of the thinginess of things, the exploration of poetic voice grounded in objects. It is most visible in the final poem of her Ariel sequence, Wintering. I have linked both of these aforementioned posts on Plath and Molloy at the base of this post.
The Week In Irish Arts and Culture .
It has been an appalling and destructive week for Irish arts , this is grounded not alone in the economical situation but in what amounts to an ongoing policy or set of policies which have starved Irish arts at their root. A degradation of immense proportion has been occurring since at least 2004 , when the current Government initiated the National Monuments Act, which showed a scant attention to to the ideology of conservation, butrather favoured the ideology of destruction for profiteering. The swathe of heritage and cultural destruction reached its rational conclusion in three things , the bisection of the Gabhra Valley , the endowment of an Artist’s exemption to the ghost-written book of a former Taoiseach and the introduction of a Criminalisation for Blasphemy onto the Irish statute in January 2010, which has reduced our place in the press freedom league.
Exploring Poetry’s ‘Lesser Space’ , Boston Globe.
I do not believe that a Government should underestimate the alienation that occurs as a result of cultural self-vandalisation and ignorance of its role in stewardship and protection, but it apparently does , as it celebrates its own myopia and abject failure in the teeth of Ireland’s depression. From Exploring Poetry’s ‘Lesser Space’ (Boston Globe’s Interview with Eavan Boland).
“Explain how Irish women, as you write, went “from being the objects of the Irish poem to being its authors.“
A The archetypical poem I have in mind is Yeats’s “Cathleen ni Houlihan,” which was a very romanticized, static portrait. The woman was so iconic and so overlaid with images of Ireland that for women to become the authors of the poem they had to somehow leave that object behind or contest it.
Q How did this affect you?
A It made me very aware of how difficult it was in Irish poetry to have an ordinary, day-to-day subject. Nineteenth-century painting, by contrast, often depicted the details of everyday life — people sitting in rooms, at tables; nobody questioned the value of those images to an artist. But when I was a young poet it was easier to have a political murder in the Irish poem than a baby.”
The Black Lace Fan my Mother Gave Me.
by Eavan Boland
It was the first gift he ever gave her,
buying it for five five francs in the Galeries
in pre-war Paris. It was stifling.
A starless drought made the nights stormy…
They stayed in the city for the summer.
The met in cafes. She was always early.
He was late. That evening he was later.
They wrapped the fan. He looked at his watch.
She looked down the Boulevard des Capucines.
She ordered more coffee. She stood up.
The streets were emptying. The heat was killing.
She thought the distance smelled of rain and lightning.
These are wild roses, appliqued on silk by hand,
darkly picked, stitched boldly, quickly.
The rest is tortoiseshell and has the reticent clear patience
of its element. It is
a worn-out, underwater bullion and it keeps,
even now, an inference of its violation.
The lace is overcast as if the weather
it opened for and offset had entered it.
The past is an empty cafe terrace.
An airless dusk before thunder. A man running.
And no way to know what happened then—
none at all—unless ,of course, you improvise:
The blackbird on this first sultry morning,
in summer, finding buds, worms, fruit,
feels the heat. Suddenly she puts out her wing—
the whole, full, flirtatious span of it.
These two poems, Corcracht and Iniata, by Nuala Ní Chonchúir are translated by the poet.
Céard tá ann nuair
nach bhfuil tú ann ach:
scáthaghaidh na bhfoirgneamh
faoi spéir fhuar na maidine,
camsholas ar cheann slinne
ag clúdach easnacha an tí,
d’fhéitheacha teann faoi
chraiceann do lámh,
an chraobh liathchorcra
ag tarraingt mí-ádh sa teach isteach,
tobar dúigh as a dtagann
línte doimhne, dothuigthe,
coinneal na hAidbhinte
ag comhaireamh i dtreo na Nollag.
Céard tá ann ach
dath ár gcaointe duitse?
Translated by Nuala Ní Chonchúir
What is there
now that you’re gone,
but:
shadow-fronted buildings
under a cold morning sky,
the memory of veins
tightening under your skin,
twilight on grey-wet slates
covering the roof-ribs,
lilac branches that bring
bad luck through the door,
an ink-well, dark with
unintelligible lines,
the Advent candle
counting down to Christmas.
What is there,
but the colour of our mourning
for you?
Iniata leis
an gcraiceann seo tá
meabhair
atá meadhránach
le himní
anam atá
chomh neamhshaolta,
dothuigthe le ceo
croí atá
féinbhriste,
brúite mar úll.
Má tá sé ar intinn agat
é a oscailt
bí ullamh:
doirtfear fuil.
trans, by Nuala Ni Chonchúir
Within this skin
please find enclosed:
a mind
over-giddy
with endless worry
a soul
wispish as mist
alien to its owner
a heart
self-broken and
bruised like fruit.
If you intend
to open it
be prepared:
it will bleed.
from Tattoo (Tatú ), le Nuala Ní Chonchúir. Publ.Arlen House 2007.
With thanks to Nuala Ní Chonchúir for the poems and translations from Tatú. Nuala’s new novel, You is available now. I have added a biographical link, so that readers may look up her books and enjoy her writing. The image which accompanies this post is courtesy of Kristina Mc Elroy, and is from the estate of her Late father, Artist Paddy Mc Elroy. I am adding some links here , to Nuala’s site, to my Cúirt 2010 visit, and to You (Via Amazon).
The Lace World.(after a piece of sixteenth-century Breton lace) How eerie it all is, as if linked by synapses; to thread bulwarks against some unseen flood that how you’ve transformed, once-love, while how the cat yowled to be let in! and the moths, that word which would end everything and Nothing hours that separate me from you only here’s a sea serpent, a helmeted soldier, Monica Ferrell , published 2005. Slate Magazine . |
 from, The Book of Contemporary Indian Poets, ed Jeet Thayil . Bloodaxe Books
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Wraiths
III. White Nights
Furrow-plodders in spats and bright-clasped brogues
Are cradling bags and hoisting beribboned drones
As their skilled neck-pullers’ fingers force the chanters
And the whole band starts rehearsing
Its stupendous, swaggering march
Inside the hall. Meanwhile
One twilight field and summer hedge away
We wait for the learner who will stay behind
Piping by stops and starts,
Making an injured music for us alone,
Early-to-beds , white-night absentees
Open-eared to this day.
from, Human Chain , by Seamus Heaney , published by Faber and Faber 2010.
Note : I am attaching to this short post a link entitled : Feis Teamhar , a Turn at Tara because I was there to hear the poets and musicians on that day. I believe that the Newspapers under-reported the day and did not attend to Mr Heaney’s words. He was there to celebrate Tara as a cultural centre and to support the Campaign to Save Tara . He was also there to support his nephew who was and is a Tara Campaigner .
Since that time , there have been other feiseanna at Tara, this was the inaugural one organised by ” Paul Muldoon, Pulitzer prize-winner, will read his poetry to celebrate and honour Tara and will be joined by musicians: Grammy award-winner Susan McKeown, Laoise Kelly, Aidan Brennan and others “.
Sometimes, love does die,
but sometimes, a stream on porous rock,
it slips down into the inner dark of a hill,
joins with other hidden streams
to travel blind as the white fish that live in it.
It forsakes one underground streambed
for the cave that runs under it.
Unseen, it informs the hill
and, like the hidden streams of the viola d’amore,
makes the hill reverberate,
so that people who wander there
wonder why the hill sings,
wonder why they find wells.
( by Moya Cannon )
From : Poetry (October- November 1995) ; Contemporary Irish Poetry, Ed Chris Agee.
First, make a letter like a monument –
An upright like the fast-held hewn stone
Immovable , and half-rimming it
The strength of Behemoth his neck-bone,
And underneath that yoke, a staff, a rood
of no less hardness than the cedar wood.
Then, on a page made golden as the crown
Of sainted man. a scripture you enscroll
Blackly, firmly with the quickened skill
Lessoned by famous masters in our school,
And with an ink whose lustre will keep fresh
For fifty generations of our flesh.
And limn below it the Evangelist
In raddled coat, on bench abidingly,
Simple and bland: Matthew his name or Mark,
Or Luke or John; the book is by his knees,
And thereby his similitudes : Lion,
Or Calf , or Eagle, or Exalted Man.
The winds that blow around the World- the four
Winds in their colours on your pages join –
The Northern Wind – its blackness interpose;
The Southern Wind -its blueness gather in;
In redness and in greenness manifest
The splendours of the Winds of East and West.
And with these colours on a ground of gold
Compose a circuit will be seen by men
As endless patience; but is nether web
Of endless effort- a strict pattern:
illumination lighting interlace
Of cirque and scroll, of panel and lattice.
A single line describes them and enfolds,
One line, one course whose term there is none,
Which in its termlessness is envoying
The going forth and the return one.
With man and beast and bird and fish therein
Transformed to species that have never been.
-With mouth a-gape or beak a-gape each stands
initial to a verse of miracle,
Of mystery and of marvel (Depth of God)
That Alpha and Omega may not spell,
Then,finished with these wonders and these signs,
Turn to the figure of your first outlines.
Axal, our angel, has sustained you so
In hand, in brain; now to seal that thing
With figures many as the days of man,
And colours, like the fire’s enamelling
That baulk, that letter you have greatly reared
To stay the violence of the entering Word !
Adjutorium nostrum , in nomine Domini
Qui fecit caelum et terram.
from The Poet’s Circuits, Collected Poems of Ireland ; Centenary Edition with a Preface by Benedict Kiely. Dolmen Press , Dublin. 1981 The Monuments , by Padraic Colum
‘He is a harmful man’ , said Sori
‘he has hurt me a lot since I met him.
every thing looks dark and sinister inside his eyes ,
I hate that’.
I hate that moment when I see his eyes
I wish I had never met him
I wish I had never known him.
He is not nice with me.
He has never been nice with any one.
He is a harmful man.
I can’t see any light in the end of tunnel
So what should I do?
I can’t go back
I have no choice
I have to go on.
I have to keep fighting with
darkness.
There in the end of tunnel,
There is may be a light
There should be a light
There must be a light
There is a light.
I will go on
I will get to that light.
I don’t care if he stings me,
It doesn’t matter if he creates darkness on my way,
It is fine if he scatters thorns of spite on my path.
I won’t give up.
He will never be able to destroy the power of beyond,
The power of hope and the power of love.
He can’t seize my calmness and confidence
He is not able to possess my thoughts.
‘He is a harmful man ‘said Sori to the mirror ,
‘look at him , he is like the injured snake
ready to strike’..’
© Sadaf Ahamdi 9/June/09
Sadaf Amhadi studied English at Ballsbridge College of Further Education. Then she began studying Art at Inchicore college of Further Education, it was a portfolio preparation course and during that time she applied for third level courses and is now studying visual Communication in IADT.
Chris Murray 