Chris Murray

A Saturday Woman Poet, Women Writers On Poethead in 2010.

December 18th, 2010
A Saturday Woman Poet 2010 , some Women Writers from the Poethead blog .

The Saturday Woman Poet category of Poethead is related to other categories and themes within this site called , 25 Pins in a Packet , Women Creators, A Saturday Woman Poet and Saturday Women Poets. I will be adding those links and archives at the end of this piece.

Poets who have appeared in the Saturday Woman Poet this year include, Ágnes Nemes Nagy, Eithne Strong, Nuala Ní Chonchúir, Moya Cannon, Sylvia Plath , Eavan Boland, Nelly Sachs , Glenda Cimino, Eva Gore-Booth, Sarojini Naidu, Denise Levertov , Liliana Ursu, Shahnaz A’Lami, Mirjam Tuominen and Celia De Fréine.

Alongside these women poets appear their translators and editors. Sometimes I have thought to add a writer of prose and or poetic prose, this list includes Nagy , Mary Lavin, Mirjam Touminen and Elisaveta Bagyrana . Tess Gallagher, Kay Boyle and Marian Glasscoe feature as editors and translators of Liliana Ursu , René Crevel and Julian of Norwich respectively .

Collaborative Translation and Visual Art, some favourites on the Poethead site.

Collaborative translations and artwork are very popular on the site with Alice Maher and Éilis Ní Dhúibhne’s work being very sought after, along with the René Crevel and Max Ernst posts. I think that Tess Gallagher’s translations of LilianaUrsu’s poems are as popular as Weil also. The most interesting thing about the women writers on Poethead is the fact that they are sought and found through search-engines through memory, scraps of remembered lines are put through multi-lingual engines and readers end up here . The most popular search-engine terms seek Bachman, Simone Weil and Levertov. It’s also heartening to see Poethead comprises a good fifth of the site’s search-engine terms, which means that readers come back to visit the site if they are happy enough with the transcriptions, book title information and translator’s works.

I also wanted to add in here a November 2010 Review of Nancy Spero’s Torture of Women , from The Nation Magazine :

“The limits of my language,” Ludwig Wittgenstein famously declared, “are the limits of my world.” One of the most notorious limits of our language, and one that has done much to limit our world, is “man” being the embodiment of humanity. That the pronoun “he” can represent indifferently “he” or “she,” that “man” represents “man” or “woman”: these are grammatical traces of the phenomenon that Simone de Beauvoir made the starting point of The Second Sex more than sixty years ago: “humanity is male and defines woman not in herself but relative to him.”
- No Images of Man: On Nancy Spero Barry Schwabsky
- Archive for the ‘A Saturday Woman Poet’ Category
- 12/11/2010 A Saturday Woman Poet , Ágnes Nemes Nagy. posted in 25 Pins in a Packet : Women Creators, A Saturday Woman Poet, Alphabets, Translation tagged A Saturday Woman Poet, Ágnes Nemes Nagy, Corvina, Dedalus Poetry, George Szirtes, Hugh Maxton, Translation
- 12/04/2010 A Saturday Woman Poet , Eithne Strong. posted in 25 Pins in a Packet : Women Creators, A Saturday Woman Poet, How Words Play., Maps, Saturday Women Poets tagged A Saturday Woman Poet, Dolmen Press, Eithne Strong, Sarah in Passing
- 11/27/2010 A Saturday Woman Poet, Eavan Boland. posted in 25 Pins in a Packet : Women Creators, A Saturday Woman Poet, Art, How Words Play., Images, Saturday Women Poets tagged Ariel: The Restored Edition, Chris Agee, Eavan Boland, poetry, Sylvia Plath
- 11/20/2010 A Saturday Woman Poet , Nuala Ní Chonchúir. posted in 25 Pins in a Packet : Women Creators, A Saturday Woman Poet, Art, How Words Play., Images, Translation tagged A Saturday Woman Writer, Nuala Ní Chonchúir, Translation
- 11/13/2010 Restored Music , Sylvia Plath’s ‘Ariel’ posted in 25 Pins in a Packet : Women Creators, A Saturday Woman Poet, How Words Play., Saturday Women Poets tagged Ariel: The Restored Edition, Faber and Faber, Frieda Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes
- 10/30/2010 A Saturday Woman Poet : Moya Cannon posted in A Saturday Woman Poet, Art, Images, Magic, Maps tagged A Saturday Woman Poet
- 10/23/2010 A Saturday Woman Poet : Emily Dickinson. posted in 25 Pins in a Packet : Women Creators, A Saturday Woman Poet, How Words Play., Saturday Women Poets tagged A Saturday Woman Poet, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, The Evolution of ‘Sheep in Fog’, Women Poets
- 10/16/2010 A Saturday Woman Poet : Sarojini Naidu. posted in 25 Pins in a Packet : Women Creators, A Saturday Woman Poet, Saturday Women Poets, Translation, Women Writers tagged Translation, Women Poets
- 09/11/2010 A Saturday Woman Poet, Glenda Cimino. posted in A Saturday Woman Poet, How Words Play., Images, Saturday Women Poets, Transformation, Women Writers tagged 25 Pins in a Packet : Women Creators, insects, Women Writers
- 09/04/2010 Two Book Versions of Julian of Norwich’s ‘Revelation’ posted in 25 Pins in a Packet : Women Creators, A Saturday Woman Poet, Alphabets, How Words Play. tagged editors, Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, Translations, University of Exeter Press, Women Writers
- 07/24/2010 ‘In Progress’ by Christina Rossetti. posted in 25 Pins in a Packet : Women Creators, A Saturday Woman Poet, Alphabets, How Words Play., Images, Saturday Women Poets, Transformation tagged Rossetti, Transformations, Women Writers
- 04/25/2010 ‘Outside and In’ : Three Women at the Cúirt Literary Festival 2010. posted in 25 Pins in a Packet : Women Creators, A Saturday Woman Poet, Alphabets, Saturday Women Poets, Women Writers tagged ‘You’, Cúirt, galway, Joyce Carol Oates, Marina Carr, Ní Chonchúir
- 11/05/2009 Eithne Strong’s ‘Sarah in Passing’. posted in A Saturday Woman Poet, Alphabets, Images, Reclamation, Women Poets, Women Writers tagged Alice Maher, Women’s Work
- 09/03/2009 Pretty useless things : by Poethead posted in A Saturday Woman Poet, Images, Uncategorized tagged Arts, Groupware, Wiki Engines
- 03/27/2009 Maudlin, By Sylvia Plath. posted in 25 Pins in a Packet : Women Creators, A Saturday Woman Poet, Alphabets, Art, Images tagged Ariel, poetry, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes
Archive for the ‘25 Pins in a Packet : Women Creators’ Category
- 10/23/2010 A Saturday Woman Poet : Emily Dickinson. posted in 25 Pins in a Packet : Women Creators, A Saturday Woman Poet, How Words Play., Saturday Women Poets tagged A Saturday Woman Poet, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, The Evolution of ‘Sheep in Fog’, Women Poets
- 10/16/2010 A Saturday Woman Poet : Sarojini Naidu. posted in 25 Pins in a Packet : Women Creators, A Saturday Woman Poet, Saturday Women Poets, Translation, Women Writers tagged Translation, Women Poets
- 10/13/2010 ‘ Said Sori to the Mirror’ Sadaf Ahmadi. posted in 25 Pins in a Packet : Women Creators, Art, Images, Women Writers tagged art, image, visual communication, Women Writers
- 10/12/2010 Two pieces for discussion regarding Gender and Publication: Publication Bias ? posted in 25 Pins in a Packet : Women Creators, Campaigns, Censorships, Ephemera, Spinnin’ Threads, Women Writers tagged gender, publication bias, Women
- 10/10/2010 Exilic Conditions #1. posted in Dispossession, Ephemera, Images, Maps, Translation tagged boats, Exiles, Ezra Pound, islands, the Seafarer, Translation
25 Pins in a Packet , Women Creators continued
March 8th 2009 , ‘Necessity, by Simone Weil

Poethead by C Murray is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

‘Ireland’ by Richard Ryan

December 17th, 2010

Ireland

That ragged
leaking raft held
between sea and sea

its long
forgotten cable melting
into deeper darkness where,

at the root
of it, the slow
sea circles and chews.

Nightly the dark-
ness lands like hands
to mine downward. springing

tiny leaks
till dawn finds
field is bog, bog lake.

Treeline 1977 — ‘Treeline’ (1977) by TP Flanagan , from ‘The Delighted Eye’

by Richard Ryan

Ravenswood. The Dolmen Press , publ. 1973

Anniversary of Ireland’s blasphemy criminalisation, Incentivisation.

December 15th, 2010
The 2006-2009 Defamation Bill : The first anniversary of the Blasphemy Criminalisation in Ireland occurs January 1st 2011. The 2006-2009 Defamation Bill in Ireland is rather unique, it was railroaded through the Dáil in summer of 2009 through a system called the guillotine vote, together with a majority vote by the two Government parties, Fianna Fáil and the Green Party.The Bill along with its blasphemy amendment then proceeded through the Seanad, and received the seal of the Irish President on July 23rd 2009.

The Blasphemy Amendment was implemented on January the first 2010 and we are coming toward its first anniversary on January the First 2011. An Úachtarán , President Mary Mac Aleese signed the amendment into Irish Law on July 23rd 2009: “In the Republic of Ireland, blasphemy is required to be prohibited by Article 40.6.1.i. of the 1937 Constitution. The common law offence of blasphemous libel was effectively replaced in 2009 by a new offence of “publication or utterance of blasphemous matter”. The continued existence of a blasphemy offence is controversial, with proponents of freedom of speech and freedom of religion arguing it should be removed.” (from Wikipedia).

We now require a constitutional Referendum to remove the criminalisation of blasphemy from our statutes and legislations as they stand on this the first anniversary of the implemented Defamation Bill. My last letter from Dermot Ahern TD ( linked in the Poethead Scribd) prevaricates on a suitable date for this promised referendum.

Analysis of the Blasphemy Amendment and the restriction of Freedom of Speech are published here: (Art 19 , OSCE. publ 2006 ).

“We welcome the abolition of the common law offences of blasphemous, obscene and seditious libel in section 34 of the Defamation Bill. We note with serious concern, however, the creation of a new offence of “publication of gravely harmful statements” in section 35(1), which may be punished by up to five years’ imprisonment. We further find it very worrying that provision is made for the summary conviction of a person who publishes a “gravely harmful statement” if the District Court considers the facts to constitute a “minor offence” fit to be tried summarily (section 35(5)), which may lead to imprisonment of up to 12 months. Neither of these provisions is appropriate in light of international standards governing defamation law. At the international level, the problems with criminal defamation laws are increasingly being exposed and criticised. The ECtHR has expressed its clear unease with criminal sanctions for defamation. For example, in the 2006 case of Raichinov v. Bulgaria, the ECtHR noted that criminal sanctions are appropriate only in certain grave cases, such as speech which incites violence. But in ordinary cases, the State’s use of criminal sanctions, rather than civil or disciplinary measures, will be a serious consideration as to whether or not the provision will satisfy the proportionality test.66 In its ruling, the ECtHR made express reference to earlier decisions expressing the same concern.67″

The above analysis occurred four years before the introduction of the Blasphemy Criminalisation in Ireland on January 2010.

Commissioned by the Representative on Freedom of the Media of the Organisation for
Security and Cooperation in Europe (2006).

October 27th 2010 : Irish times report on Press freedom in Ireland , Via Reporters Sans Frontieres:

“IRELAND’S BLASPHEMY law has caused it to fall from joint first to 10th place in the 2010 Reporters Sans Frontières Press Freedom Index. Last year, the Paris-based organisation, which measures freedom of the press around the globe, ranked Ireland in joint-first position with Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. Ireland had jumped from joint fourth in 2008, and from eighth place in 2007. “Obviously the situation in relation to press freedom in general in Ireland is quite good, but Ireland lost a lot of points this year due to the blasphemy legislation,” the organisation’s Olivier Basille told The Irish Times . “The possible consequences of this law, both in Ireland and internationally, are very worrying.”Reporters Sans Frontières strongly condemned the law, which established blasphemy as an offence punishable by a fine of up to €25,000, shortly after it took effect on January 1st. “As it stands, this law offers legal grounds to religious extremists of all kinds. It allows them to use the force of the law to impose their views,” the organisation had said. “Ireland has just taken the EU back several centuries . . .”

Dermot Ahern is to retire at the next Irish general election, he has still not named a date for the required referendum.

Now the Irish people must await until the Justice Minister, who will retire at the next election, to name a date for a constitutional referendum to remove this offensive amendment from our legislation. That Referendum did not occur since implementation in January 2010 and is as yet unannounced for 2011. I will update here. This post will be migrated onto a separate Poethead page which has just been opened, entitled The 2006 Defamation bill.

This implementation of the blasphemy Legislation under the 2006 Defamation Bill was ill-reported in Ireland and appeared on January 4th 2010, as a result of a huge global media discussion of the Atheist Ireland campaign:

“ATHEISTS HAVE begun a campaign against the Government’s new blasphemy law, which came into force on January 1st as part of the Defamation Act. The group Atheist Ireland has published 25 quotes it says are blasphemous, attributed to people from Jesus Christ to Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern.

Under the new law, which the group is campaigning to have repealed, blasphemy is punishable by a fine of up to €25,000. It defines blasphemy as publishing or uttering matter grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby intentionally causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents of that religion, and intending by such publication to cause such outrage.”

I suppose that our children will get to judge if an irish Justice Minister incentivised religious and legalistic battles regarding freedom of speech, and the creation of jargon by a Fianna Fáil/Green Majority vote.
- Irish Times January 4th 2010
  International Pen Press release on Defamation of Religions
  Article 19 , OSCE 2006
  Blasphemies Category on Poethead
‘A Work for Poets’ by George Mackay Brown.

December 14th, 2010
A Work for Poets

To have carved on the days of our vanity
A sun
A star
A cornstalk

Also a few marks
From an ancient forgotten time
A child may read

That not far from the stone
A well
Might open for wayfarers

Here is a work for poets—
Carve the runes
Then be content with silence.
Lux Perpetua.

A star for a cradle
Sun for plough and net
A fire for old stories
A candle for the dead.

Lux perpetua
By such glimmers we seek you.

I have two reading recommendations this sunny cold morning in Dublin, Interrogation of Silence, The writings of George Mackay Brown, Rowena and Brian Murray. Publ. John Murray (2004). and The Absence of Myth by Georges Bataille Publ. Version (1994/2006).

I am sad to hear the John Hurst, proprietor of Rare and Interesting Books in Westport died this past weekend, he always got the exact book that I sought and I had put him alongside Charlie Byrne’s In Galway for his excellent collection of books. Indeed I had been re-reading a certain book this weekend that I had bought from him in the last years, RIP. For those readers interested in George Mackay Brown, I include here the GMB website, along with a link to a short Poethead post on John’s lovely bookshop in Mayo.
- George Mackay Brown website and Index
- Rare and Interesting Books, In Westport, Co Mayo

‘Hemisphere’ by Ágnes Nemes Nagy.

December 11th, 2010

Hemisphere

by Ágnes Nemes Nagy.

Here, is the upper hemisphere. Still grey,
where grey and liquid white
meet a liquid stairway,
and with the white whiter yet.

Here, is the upper zone where
on frosty grass thaw starts,
where the dew
stitching grass and air
makes the field seem higher –
an uncertain rainbow.

Then suddenly, God’s optic,
with its expanding triangle
like snap mutation
in prolonged epochs –
and from then, metal,
this concave height is metal
which sucks the last drop of haze
as the cursive traces
of a rising vertigo ;

because here, is the horizon of white metals,
upper-half of the sphere-world,
late morning’s theology,

where midnight is a motionless
black cauldron in the big lakes.

from Between, by Ágnes Nemes Nagy, Trans Hugh Maxton.

Above the Object

by Ágnes Nemes Nagy.

For there is light above every object.
Like polar circles, the shining trees are decked.
Comes one by one a glowing skybound regiment,
in caps of light , the ninety-two elements,
bearing on each brow the image of each mode –
I believe in the resurrection of the body.

Above the Object , by Ágnes Nemes Nagy.

Between, by Ágnes Nemes Nagy, Trans. by Hugh Maxton. Corvina Press , Budapest and Dedalus Press, Dublin. 1988.

Do Arts Cuts hit the right note? Irish Times

December 10th, 2010
‘This week’s Budget, of course, represents the Coalition Government’s thinking on the role of the arts. Both Fine Gael and Labour, who are likely to form the next government, are due to issue cultural policy documents in coming weeks. The fact that they are putting the arts on their pre-election agenda indicates that both parties have taken note of the case that has been made for the relevance of the arts in any recovery programme – both economically and in the re-establishment of national identity.’
By Gerry Smith (Irish Times 10/12/2010)

This is the ultimate paragraph of The Irish Times article Do arts cuts hit the right note? I am adding it in here , along with a link to my post on Fianna Fáil Arts policy, Scribbling in the Margins. It’s my opinion that something other than attrition is what is required in terms of cultural support, including a review of the 2003 Arts Act, which has brought the work of Government too close to what should be a naturally evolving area of concern. I am looking forward to seeing oppositional party papers on the issues of arts, conservation and heritage over the coming weeks, and I will of course link them in these pages.

‘in only a few years Culture Ireland has become something of cornerstone of arts policy and it would appear that into the future, the potential for a company or artist to represent Ireland abroad could become a consideration in how well they are funded.

If such a criterion were to be cast in stone, the danger is the formation of an elite with advantaged access to State support and a loss of the risk-taking that is needed in the case of those who are only beginning their careers.’

The Full Irish Times article link is attached, along with my critique of Fianna Fáil’s policy in this area since the 2003 Arts Act.
Campaign for Arts
Scribbling in the Margins , Fianna Fáil Arts Policy.

December 8th, 2010
Ireland has fallen in the Press Freedom League due to the addition of an amendment to the 2006-2009 defamation legislation( enacted on January the First 2010). This fact is mostly unsurprising , except maybe to the Irish media who chose not to highlight the international dialogues on the dangers of defamation censorship, but to attack the group who launched a campaign to highlight these very dangers.

We in Ireland are approaching the first anniversary of that censorship which was launched by an Irish justice Minister , Dermot Ahern, under the advisement of the Irish Attorney General (on January the First 2011).

The fact that the Bill was shoved through under what we politely term guillotined debate and with majority vote was practically ignored by our press, who awaited until a global conversation had occurred and only highlighted the issue 24 hours after the amendment was implemented !

There is of course historical precedent in the Fianna Fáil party for ill-judged censorship which attacks the development of free-speech, and in its turn the Arts and the cultural development of our country. I have highlighted this throughout 2010 in a number of Poethead posts , which I am excerpting and linking here. It is my belief that this is part and parcel of the history of the Fianna Fáil party which sidelined, censored and under-funded the Arts in a manner which led to and will continue to lead to an intellectual diaspora from Ireland. Excerpt for The Old King : The Criminalisation for Blasphemy remains on the Irish Statute.

The development of the Arts in Ireland has since 2003 , under the O Donoghue Arts Act , been atrophied by the concerns of ministers more interested in sports and who appoint our Arts Council. The all-embracing silence of artists and thinkers on the criminalisation of blasphemy being a pointer to an inability to discuss anything outside of very narrow two-dimensional concerns of output and finance , which isn’t really about the realm of ideas and the intellect at all.”

The 2003 O Donoghue Arts Act and the Relation of the Irish Government to the Arts Council.

I have alluded to the Arts Act 2003 which has been covered competently enough in the Press and which brings Government very close to deciding what constitutes Irish art, this Act is a carbon-copy of De Valera policies which led to the Rouault Controversy, the foundation of outsider arts groups and the evolution of an official Irish arts which owed everything to an ideology of mirroring governmental concerns in the development of the State but starved a generation of intellectual food.

There are currently numerous rows in Ireland regarding funding, I reckon the intercine squabbling amongst those who want the crumbs off the table is wholly undignified and that we should be looking at remedies such as the Repeal of the 2003 Arts Act, the independence from Government of Arts Council Appointments, and the relation of the Arts Council to the Revenue Commission ( who seek Govt. advisement on the endowment of tax exemptions) .

I do not believe that the Fianna Fáil Party are nurturing the root of Press-freedom or intellectual and cultural development through policies that have managed to starve arts and cultural institutes of their needed revenues, that have left the regions bereft of decent cultural centres and that have failed to identify the problems in their 13 years of policy which is showing itself as an abject failure on a cultural scale.

Poethead Links and Irish Imprints , reacting to savage Fianna Fáil and Green Cutbacks in Arts.

I aways think that European cultures know the value of their poetic and literary traditions more so than us Irish, but I am optimistically waiting to be proven wrong. I include herein some of the Independent Press names , which will evolve and be added to and indeed I have added also some online writers who I and many others enjoy.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Statement from the National Campaign for Arts on Budget 2010.

December 7th, 2010

First of all we want to say well done. We achieved a lot this year. An unprecedented effort was made to meet as many local and national politicians face to face to explain why the arts are vital and why public funding is needed. More than 85 TDs were met. Presentations were made to Oireachtas Committees, local councillors, as well as a variety of conferences, seminars and university groups. Members of the public and many of us who work in the arts sent nearly 12,000 emails to their TDs.
Thanks to those of you who helped make this happen. You have helped the arts in Ireland.

Funding will be down in 2011. The impact on individual artists and organisations won’t be known until next year. However we made the case. We were listened to. The cuts at national level are nothing like as bad as many had feared. (We won’t know how much local funding is cut by until later next year).
Here’s the initial news we have about the Budget and the arts:

* The cuts are biggest on the capital side rather than current spending.
* Culture Ireland got a big increase of 71%.This huge increase is to roll out its programme Imagine Ireland in the USA next year.

Item	2010 Spend €m	2011 Total €m	Change 2011 over 2010 €m
National Archives	€1,720	€1,514	-12%
IMMA, Chester Beatty Library , National Concert Hall, Crawford Gallery	€14,069	€12,896	-8%
Cultural Projects (e.g Dublin Contemporary, Hunt Museum, Foynes Flying Boat Museum, Science Gallery, James Joyce Centre, March’s Library)	€4,420	€4,297	-3%
Cultural Development(ACCESS Arts Capital funding & the Cultural Technology Grants)	€16,491	€8,265	-50%
Culture Ireland	€4,083	€6,997	71%
The Arts Council (part funded by the National Lottery)	€68,649	€65,167	-5%
National Museum of Ireland	€15,125	€14,240	-6%
National Library of Ireland	€9,348	€8,084	-14%
Irish Film Board	€19,272	€18,431	-4%
National Gallery	€10,163	€9,850	-3%

In terms of how the constituent parts of the Department break down, see below.

Department Breakdown	2010 €m	2011 €m	Change 2011 over 2010
Tourism	€153,120	€147,827	-3.46%
Culture	€153,177	€136,891	-10.63%
Sport*	€117,721	€86,525	-26.50%
Administration costs of Department	€11,282	€11,002	-2.48%

*Sports funding dropped significantly because some of the major sports infrastructure projects e.g Aviva Stadium, National Sports Campus etc are completed. But elsewhere an additional €5 million is allocated in grants to sporting bodies.

NOTE: This post will be archived and migrated onto the Poethead Campaign for Arts page in a short time. It helps to keep all related materials near each other so that the reader can trace exactly how FF/GN have consistently undermined and eroded Arts Development in Ireland.

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

From ‘Skywriting’ by Dennis O Driscoll

December 7th, 2010
from Skywriting

by Dennis O Driscoll

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

‘Reality Check’ , by Dennis O Driscoll
- ‘No Earthly Estate’ , Kavanagh , Colum and Strong
- Review of Reality Check , by Dennis O Driscoll
Dennis O Driscoll , ‘Reality Check’. Publ Anvil Press 2007.
‘No Earthly Estate’, the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh, Padraic Colum and Eithne Strong.

December 4th, 2010
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 !

The Devil

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

Archive for the ‘25 Pins in a Packet : Women Creators’ Category

Ireland

A Work for Poets

Lux Perpetua.

Hemisphere

NOTE: This post will be archived and migrated onto the Poethead Campaign for Arts page in a short time. It helps to keep all related materials near each other so that the reader can trace exactly how FF/GN have consistently undermined and eroded Arts Development in Ireland.

from Skywriting

by Dennis O Driscoll

The Devil