Category: Maps
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FEIS TEAMHRA: A TURN AT TARA
“The fourth annual Feis Teamhra: A Turn at Tara, which features readings and performances by internationally recognized Irish writers and musicians, will be held between 3 and 5 o’clock on Sunday August 28 2011 on the Hill of Tara itself. Those taking part this year are Aidan Brennan, Peter Fallon, Laoise Kelly, Susan McKeown, Paul Murray and a surprise musical guest who just happens to be one of Ireland’s greatest singer-songwriters. The MC for the event is Paul Muldoon. Admission is free.
While the Hill of Tara has in recent years become a contested spot, symbolizing less the sacred site where ancient Ireland crowned its kings than the desecrated site where modern Ireland gave in to crass consumerism and, as it were, drowned in things, the note the organizers hope to strike is not one of confrontation but celebration. Feis Teamhra: A Turn at Tara is a celebration of the continuity of the linked traditions of Irish writing and music, traditions that have almost certainly flourished here since at least 2000 BC.
We’re delighted to welcome Paul Murray, the Dublin-based author of An Evening of Long Goodbyes (2003), which was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award, and Skippy Dies (2010), a book quite accurately described by the New York Times as “extravagantly entertaining.” The New Yorker, meanwhile, praised its “remarkable dialogue, which captures the free-associative, sex-obsessed energy of teenage conversation in all its coarse, riffing brilliance.” Skippy Dies, a book that’s reminiscent of A Portrait on Peyote, was shortlisted for the Costa Prize, the National Book Critics’ Circle Prize and the Irish Book Award.
We also extend a particular welcome to the Meath-based poet and publisher Peter Fallon, who is celebrated for the unfussy but nonetheless fusillading nature of his poems. They speak softly but carry a big stick, one cut from a local hedge. Some of Peter Fallon’s best work is to be found in News of the World: Selected and New Poems (1998) and his translations of The Georgics of Virgil (2004/2006). A member of Aosdana, Peter Fallon received the 1993 O’Shaughnessy Poetry Award from the Irish American Cultural Institute.
The musical component of Feis Teamhra: A Turn at Tara is curated by Susan McKeown, the Dublin-born, New York-based, Grammy-winning singer-songwriter. Susan McKeown released her seventh solo album, Singing in the Dark, in October 2010. In addition to her career as a solo artist, Susan McKeown’s heart-felt, heart-breaking singing has led her to work with, among others, Natalie Merchant, Linda Thompson, Pete Seeger, Mary Margaret O’Hara, Billy Bragg, Arlo Guthrie, and the Klezmatics.
Among the other musicians featured this year are Aidan Brennan and Laoise Kelly. Aidan Brennan is an inspired guitarist who has worked not only with Susan McKeown (Sweet Liberty, 2004), but Kevin Burke (Kevin Burke in Concert, 1999) and Loreena McKennitt (Book of Secrets, 1997, and Midwinter Night’s Dream, 2008). Born in Dublin, Aidan Brennan now lives in Laois.
Laoise Kelly, generally considered to be the foremost Irish harper, lives in her native Mayo. The Irish Times has described her as “a young harpist with the disposition of an iconoclast and the talent and technique of a virtuoso.” In addition to her own CD (Just Harp, 2000), Laoise Kelly has worked with Sharon Shannon, The Chieftains, Natalie MacMaster, Sinead O’Connor and Kate Bush.
The image is from the first ever Turn at Tara
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Preamble to The Valley by Kerry Hardie
‘The first valley is the Valley of the Quest,
the second the Valley of Love
the third is the Valley of Understanding
the fourth is the Valley of Independence and Detachment
the fifth of Pure Unity
the sixth is the Valley of Astonishment
and the seventh is the Valley of Poverty and Nothingness
beyond which one can go no further. ‘from , The Conference of the Birds by Farid ud-Din Attar, written in the second half of the twelfth century AD. This rendering in english is by C.S Nott.
I published a short poem of condolence this week for the victims of atrocity in Norway, and got to thinking about the bird poems that are linked on the blog. There are quite a few bird poems, as there are images scattered on the blog. I thought to link them here today.
The avatar that I chose for Poethead is a bird, Max Ernst’s image is one of a set of lithographs used in his illustration of René Crevel‘s Babylon . My avatar image is just below this short post on the bottom right-hand column of the Poethead home page (and all of the pages on this blog) .
The Bird Poems from Poethead.
- from, An Duanaire: http://poethead.wordpress.com/2008/08/09/nach-aoibhinn-do-na-heinini/
- from , An Duanaire : http://poethead.wordpress.com/2010/06/05/failte-don-ean-an-duanaire/
- Kerry Hardie : http://poethead.wordpress.com/2011/01/08/a-saturday-woman-poet-kerry-hardie/
- ‘Aviary by Tom Mc Intyre’ : http://poethead.wordpress.com/2010/10/07/aviary-by-tom-macintyre/
- ‘The Swallows Fly’ : http://poethead.wordpress.com/2010/08/22/two-poems-by-mirjam-touminen/
- ‘The Philosopher and the Birds’ :http://poethead.wordpress.com/2010/07/15/the-philosopher-and-the-birds-by-richard-murphy-via-poethead/
- ‘Hide’ by Catríona O’ Reilly : http://poethead.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/hide-by-catriona-o-reilly/
- ‘Willy-Wag and Sparrow’ : http://poethead.wordpress.com/2011/07/28/willy-wag-and-sparrow-by-nancy-cato/
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I often wonder at the definition of Outsider Poetry just a little bit, and have made allusions to the poetry of diaspora before now on this blog. Of course the poetry of alienation/diaspora, be it in the wake of cataclysm, war or economic circumstance is more than just that. The exilic condition forms a thread in world literature that we recognise historically in the poems of the dispossessed, that are so beautifully edited and collected in An Duanaire , for instance.
Blogs and websites dedicated to the dissemination of the poetry of nomadics, meanderings and exile are (and have been) online for a while, even if they comprise a marginalia. The PENs, Arvon, and UBUWEB amongst others consistently and brilliantly bring forward the voice of the diasporist. For instance, there are manifestos dedicated to the art of poetics grounded in the experience of the writer/artist available on multiple sites, and of course on the International PEN site, (TLRC)
My first experience of reading a diasporist manifesto was in 1995, when I bought The First Diasporist Manifesto by RB Kitaj, I was intrigued by his approach to his art and by the manifesto which served as the invisible architecture that underpinned his Tate retrospective. I thought to excerpt a short paragraph here to illustrate the condition, from the artist’s point of view.
‘Nationalism seems awful; it’s track record stinks, but patriotism doesn’t seem half bad. ————On the other hand, if people want their homelands, why not? Partitioned homelands seem better to me than killing each other. My own homeland, America , and my little one , England, offer such strong appearances of peace and freedom that the really odd and peaceful practice of painting spins out my own Diasporic days and years until I can’t sense any other way to go.’ ( By RB Kitaj)
The subject is evidently too great for this blog, thus I have decided to divide the topic into two, (possibly) three sections. I am not going to look at alienation yet, as the issue is highly complex and comprises but one element of outsider art. The fact that alienation is oft met with physical violence further complicates any advance on the problem. The danger for the reader is always to associate diasporism with alienation, when it is but one cause of dispossession and it’s related consequences for the narrative arts, including the translator’s art.
The subtext of this post is how far do we think outsider art is from our experience of reading books of poetics, I believe that the area dedicated to the translation and rights of the poets is no longer a marginalia. I see this on blogs and in debate, unfortunately this is not reflected in what publishers are producing, save in speciality areas such as the poetry societies. The fact that authors have noted that translation merits little in prize-awards , as recently mentioned in relation to the Booker Prize, suggests that the marginalisation occurs at the budgeting level, rather than at the level of popularity displayed by submissions to contests and online anthologies.
We are familiar, as mentioned above, with the poetry of exile – the exilic condition , from sources like An Duanaire, or even Ulysses , that novel is an exile’s song, a recreation of Dublin city in its minutiae by James Joyce, its quite an example of alienation poetry also !
I am adding in here an excerpt from Notes Towards a Nomadics Poetics, Pierre Joris blog:
The days of anything static – form, content, state – are over. The past century has shown that anything not involved in continuous transformation hardens and dies. All revolutions have done just that: those that tried to deal with the state as much as those that tried to deal with the state of poetry.
Related Article links
- http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1744790.First_Diasporist_Manifesto
- http://www.albany.edu/~joris/nomad.htmll
- http://poethead.wordpress.com/2011/05/07/a-link-to-the-poetry-of-assia-djebar-from-the-pierre-joris-blog/
- http://www.indymedia.ie/article/86102 /
- http://poethead.wordpress.com/2009/02/25/rb-kitaj-excerpt-from-the-first-diasporist-manifesto
- http://www.internationalpen.org.uk/go/committees/translation-and-linguistic-rights http://www.librarything.com/work/159337.
- http://pierrejoris.com/nomad.html
- http://www.guernicamag.com/features/2692/jarrar_intro_6_1_11/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+guernica/content+(Guernica+/+Content)
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Secret Waters
Lo, in my soul there lies a hidden lake,
High in the mountains, fed by rain and snow,
The sudden thundering avalanche divine,
And the bright waters’ everlasting flow,
Far from the highways’ dusty glare and heat.
Dearer it is and holier, for Christ’s sake,
Than his own windy lake in Palestine,
For there the little boats put out to sea
Without him, and no fisher hears his call,
Yea, on the desolate shores of Galilee
No man again shall see his shadow fall.
Yet here the very voice of the one Light
Haunts with sharp ecstasy each little wind
That stirs still waters on a moonlit night,
And sings through high trees growing in the mind,
And makes a gentle rustling in the wheat. . . .
Yea, in the white dawn on this happy shore,
With the lake water washing at his feet,
He stands alive and radiant evermore,
Whose presence makes the very East wind kind,
And turns to heaven the soul’s green-lit retreat.by Eva Gore Booth.
( also published the OSG ‘The Whores will be busy’ poem elsewhere, and they were….)
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Serenade: Any Man to Any Woman
Dark angel who art clear and straight
As canon shining in the air,
Your blackness doth invade my mind
And thunderous as the armored wind
That rained on Europe is your hair;And so I love you till I die—
(Unfaithful I, the canon’s mate):
Forgive my love of such brief span,
But fickle is the flesh of man,
and death’s cold puts the passion out.I’ll woo you with a serenade—
The wolfish howls the starving made;
And lies shall be your canopy
To shield you from the freezing sky.
Yet when I clasp you in my arms—
Who are my sleep, the zero hour
That clothes, instead of flesh, my heart,—
You in my heaven have no part,
For you, my mirage broken in flower,
Can never see what dead men know!
Then die with me and be my love:
The grave shall be your shady grove
And in your pleasaunce rivers flow
(To ripen this new paradise)
From a more universal flood
Than Noah knew: But yours is blood.
Yet still you will imperfect be
That in my heart the death’s chill grows,
—A rainbow shining in the night,
Born of my tears … your lips, the bright
Summer-old folly of the rose.
Serenade: Any Man to Any Woman by Edith Sitwell
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A short time ago I wrote an introductory to the Poetry Foundation discussion on best practices in Fair Use of Poetry, which should serve as a guideline on the creation, licensing and transmission of original materials.
” Fair use, a limitation and exception to the exclusive right granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work, is a doctrine in United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders. Examples of fair use include commentary, criticism, news reporting, research, teaching, library archiving and scholarship. It provides for the legal, non-licensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author’s work under a four-factor balancing test. The term fair use originated in the United States. A similar principle, fair dealing, exists in some other common law jurisdictions. Civil law jurisdictions have other limitations and exceptions to copyright“.
That link on Fair Use and current discussion on the creation of a new Irish Version of 3.0/BY-NC-SA/Draft Creative Commons Licence (UCC) have prompted a short piece at Writing.ie regarding the treatment of the Poet’s original work, both ours as poets, or as we review or translate the original writing of fellow writers in our blog-spaces or in other online modes of transmission. I’d like to thank Vanessa O Loughlin who requested the piece.
Introduction to The Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute discussion here:
“During 2009, the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute convened a group of poets, editors, publishers, and experts in copyright law and new media, with the goal of identifying obstacles preventing poetry from coming fully into new media and, where possible, imagining how to remove or mitigate these obstacles. Embracing the overarching value of access to poetry as its theme, the group saw that business, technological, and societal shifts had profound implications for poets publishing both in new and in traditional media, and also that poets have an opportunity to take a central role in expanding access to a broad range of poetry in the coming months and years. The resulting Poetry and New Media: A Users’ Guide report covers topics such as copyright and fair use; royalties, permissions, and licensing; estates; access and lifelong engagement with poetry; and engaging educators, institutions, and communities.
The Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute invites poets, publishers, and everyone involved with poetry as an art form to consider this report, the upcoming Best Practices for Fair Use in Poetry document, and other available resources as they make their own thoughtful and conscious decisions based on their values and priorities in relation to these topics. As the new-media environment is ever changing, we present the Poetry and New Media report and the upcoming Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Poetry in the spirit of an evolving conversation on a timely topic.”
Creative Commons -
Cóiced.
‘ The word for a ‘province’ in Irish is ‘fifth’.
The fifth one : Meath or ‘middle’ place,
is secret : a drawer, or priest-hole,
Omphallos
a sliding door oiled into space
rock-faced , as in sheer of cliff.‘We’ll find them’, callow children laughed
on mid-term breaks
in plastic macs.
‘Don’t drive. We’ll walk.’
They held a compass : North, North-West
and tied a thread to leave a trail.We found one body in a field
metal-detected teeth through lime
walking-shoes out on a ledge.
One child survived. Now ninety-nine
one plain, one purl, hand-knitted
time of sorrow. For
‘Wherever you walk in Ireland
you reach the edge.’by Mark Patrick Hederman
Discussed here
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On Rebellion, by Prageeta Sharma.
(for Katy Lederer)
“It was not a romantic sentiment , nor self-determined; rather , it was embarrassing.
My love of spearheading, from introvert to extrovert,
from cowardice to consequence, from the enjambment to the unspecified dunce.
It was a sabotage, a reckless moment : a purulent, tawny decree.
All temptation puzzled me and drew me in.
I dropped out of a large life,
I flew over exams, I punched out breakfast teachers with lunch money,
toiling over the idea of belonging rather than over upward mobility.
I understood how power flung outward
into the troves of the cursed ( I felt troubled or cursed all of the time).
I wasn’t bearing oranges, limes, or even lemons.
All of it blurred together so that a mere suggestion made by
an outside force was something to be freely ignored.
I could nod off, I could misinterpret, it could be reconfigured as a negotiation.
The fog felt like an aphorism. Never lifting, always dull,
always an added pull. The tribunal cloud judged below, judged my direction.
There was lying, conning, faking, elucidating in order to get away with undoing.
I was interested in preserving yet I can’t tell you if it felt
sacred or befallen.
Your anxiety might have represented a crushing faith
or a character assassination, my own or someone else’s.
Or a lack of grip on reality : the wet rip of the grocery bags
all of it falling –
your body on all fours.
Accumulating soot upon retrieval.
There were downsides to feeling different so I huddled
in the corner (not a ball, not rocking). I felt friendless and yet social.
I felt no aptitude towards refining a skill.
However, words cut my brain into two brains with their precipice
their demarcations, their incisions (too strong a word).
They held me captive against their edge,
their influence : I felt like insinuating something delicate or dear.Now- I am playing on- trying to pay attention to the collusion that I must
be playing over
and over in my mind, and it was my mind,
it needed me to leave everything outside, on the steps or in the sky,
to feign exhaustion in order to meet an aberration,
the one in the corner that felt large and carefree with its
own vernacular sprawled with whitewash on bricks or floors or that ghastly
far above that kept me standing very still but perhaps I wasn’t inactive,
I was just interpreting what had already been an assumed boundary,
immersed in its insularity and in what stuck to its roundedness.”Prageeta Sharma was born in Framingham, Mass. in 1972. Her parents came from Jaipur. This poem is taken from The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets, ed Jeet Thayil. Bloodaxe Books 2008. Reviewed at this link.
Chris Murray 