Poetry Festival

This week was the Cuisla International Poetry Festival in Limerick. I went to hear three poets read their works in the St. John’s Daghdha Space. The Space is a “desanctified” church, which has been turned into a dance studio and art center. The altar apse has a blue roof painted with golden stars. Where the altar was now hangs a huge AV screen suspended on cables so that it look sort of like a huge white square cross, a sort of freakish metaphor for modern media. The crowd who attended this poetry reading must have represented the artsy creative fringe Limerick community, and they looked very similar to the Cincinnati artsy creative fringe. It was a crowd dressed in black, brown or dark green, sensible shoes, and slightly loose clothing. They were generally between 30 and 60, with longer hair, the only dye in evidence being shocking red henna on the women who were wearing long fringy black skirts. Because these were rather famous poets who were reading, there were a few nattily dressed people in pumps and shiny wingtips who wore clothing that fit.

At the side of the “stage” was the snack area, which served the obligatory tea/coffee/finger food, but before I launch into my narrative about these amazing poets, I really must tell you about the snacks. Oh, what snacks! Last weekend, at the Blasket Island Conference, they had a reception where they served not enough wine and some very flaccid trays of wilted lettuce, spray can salmon pate on package rye rounds, and yellow cheese squares with salami chunks. Terrible food, and so little of it! But at the Cuisla poetry reading, they had the most delectable gourmet snacks I have ever tasted and not had to pay for. First of all, they had gallons of hot hot tea with whole milk and pots of sugar. The snacks included, smoked chicken with melted parmesan on farm-house wheat bread, focaccia with bruschetta and mozzarella, soda bread with caramelized onions on pesto topped with camembert, and mini-quiches made with butter and cream and smoked ham. For dessert they brought out a bucket loader sized tray of scones and a chocolate mousse pie with walnuts. The snack table was decorated with yellow roses.

And the poetry was as good as the snacks. The first reader was Desmond O’Grady who read poems written when he was teaching poetry in Alexandria, Egypt. He was described by the introductory hostess as having “eyes as deep as the sea and as engaging.” He must have been about 80 years old, slightly stooped, wearing a blue checked suit coat with a salmon pink pocket-handkerchief. His nose and cheeks were very pink. He said the key questions we must ask our selves are: who are we, where are we, what are we doing here. Once you have answered those questions, you should write a poem about where you have ended up. You write that poem because “poems are the blossoms of the soul growing on the blank page.” The acoustics of the old church were such that I could only hear 80% of what he said, the rest was inflected murmuring. He started out reading a poem about a river. He said, “Here in Limerick, we call our Nile the Shannon, but in Egypt they call their Shannon the Nile.” He wrote a poem about that. He said he wished to celebrate the spontaneous, rich, overflowing language that we value. He knew Arabic, English, Irish, French, Greek, Scots Gaelic, and Welsh, but he read all his poems in English.

The next two poets were introduced by a 50 year old woman with flaming red hair wearing a butter yellow shawl over a blue jacket and yellow T-shirt. She garnished her English liberally with Irish such that it was hard to tell which language was on at any given moment, they were so smoothly blended. She told us the poets bring us love and mystery, and they remind us of our glorious past.

The first Irish language poet was Paddy Bushe from south Kerry. He read his poems first in English and then in Irish. His Irish was rolling and flowing pastel gutturals and sibilants. While he read, church bells rang, scooters accelerated by, and a siren drifted past. It seemed like his performance included the poetry hall and the wide world all around. He says he wrote a poem about the place where Amergin, the druid and poet, came to shore on Ireland, and in the smoke of the burning ships he claimed Ireland as his own. Bushe says this ancient poet made landfall in his mind, so he had to write a poem about him. He wore a slate blue shirt, a pine green jacket, navy blue pants, and black shoes. Another poem he read was about an arctic hare that he saw while he was in Greenland. His poem was about how he wished the smart, wary hare safety from the hunting hounds, and he said “the world is now a hare between two packs, and I would that we should not die, our white fur spattered with blood.”

The second Irish language poet was Cahil O Searcaigh from Donegal. His voice was high and nasal with the northern substitution of /t/ for /th/. His Irish was hard and precise with deeply rounded vowels, sharp sibilants, and swallowed gutturals. He started his presentation in Irish and then added English as he felt necessary. I would say that more than half of this educated audience knew Irish. People were chatting in Irish during the delectable snack breaks. Searcaigh said of Limerick, “This city rubs me like a new shoe, but leather softens and stretches.” He read a poem about gluttony, one of the seven deadly sins that he said he preferred to call the Magnificent Seven. He said it with such a cheerful leer that I had to cover my mouth to not shout with laughter. This man is so ALIVE with the business of living. He is not a tall man, and he is round. His face is, pink, chinless and round. He was wearing a Nepalese wool cap, a collarless tweed jacket, and a Ganesh t-shirt. In one of his poems, he quotes a popular song, and the audience sings softly along with him. There is no clapping between each poem, but there is extended and enthusiastic clapping after the entire reading.

No one who has heard these two poets can say that Irish is a dying language. It was so powerful and expressive. In Irish grammar, the agent is the noun, and not the person so that things happen at you and to you. You don’t have things; things are at you or with you. The language inflects for direction and movement so you know specifically where things are and if they are moving or not. The people at this Cuisla would smoothly switch between Irish and English so that the two blended. O’Grady called this the “rugged landscape of the Irish language.” Time was also different at this event, similar to how it was at the Blasket Conference: it was fluid and things happened when it was time for them to happen, and one could not use a clock to find out when that was. The readings started when the poet was ready, and people had snacks and chatted for substantial intervals between poets. North American child that I am, at first I consulted by program, and looked around, and consulted my program again, and then decided that the program was merely a set of guidelines, so I went and had more snacks to keep me company until something new happened.

I had walked to the Cuisla, so I was walking home again afterward. I stopped by the Aldi to pick up toilet tissue and toothpaste, as the Aldi was on the way home. In the parking lot of the Aldi, I hesitated. I did not want to take the regular route home along the main street because it was a loud four-lane highway type road in one place and quite an unpleasant place to walk. I looked out over the parking lot and across the fields that lay between the Aldi and the river. I knew the riverside path lay there, and I supposed one just walked across the fields to get there. How hard could it be? I slid under the fence and set off. The path I thought I was following turned out to be a cow path, and it ended in a clump of bushes. I forged left and suddenly found myself up to my ankles in duckweed. Luckily, I was wearing gortex boots, so the only result of my drainage ditch detection was a damp cuff. On the other side of the full drainage ditch was a huge sign that said “Keep Out.” I saw horses in the distance and thought it would be a good idea to take a different route. I knew that there were athletic fields that bordered the river walk off to my left, so I jumped three quarters of the way across the ditch and pulled myself, my toilet tissue, and my toothpaste up the nettle covered slope on the other side. When I reached the top, I had managed to maintain my toiletries, and I had added a bunch of nettle stings to the things I was bringing home. I trotted off though the subdivision to find the athletic fields. Following the sight of goals posts that stuck up over the roofs, I turned down a street and marched straight into a travelers’ camp.

Travelers are a distinct group of people in Ireland who are itinerant workers, sort of professional homeless people who have a distinct culture, music, and demographic. The State is trying to get them to settle down, so they are giving them subsidized housing. This street was completely separate from the subdivision, divided out from the middle class by a tall cinderblock wall so that their street was private. It was covered with trash, wrecked cars, and campers in various stages of decay. A young boy was riding a colt up and down the street. There was a powerful air of transience about the two cinderblock homes that backed up to the fields along the river. Gripping my poetry notes and my package of toilet tissue, I strode past the houses and the suddenly silent people in the litter strewn yards, only to discover that the end of the street was cinderblocked off, and there were gates to the athletic fields, but they were locked and had three surveillance cameras focused on the walls around the field. I rejected Plan A (climb wall on tape) and chose Plan B, walk back through the Travelers with a cheery mien. I made a greeting noise at the people in the street, and they just stared at me until I had passed. As I was leaving the camp area, I saw a door in a tall iron fence through which two girls had just passed. It looked like it went in the direction of the river, so I passed through the gate. The path went through a narrow lot full of thrashed shopping carts, fire rings, and pile of plastic detritus. Thirty second later, I was on the Shannon River walk with the middle class chocolate Labrador Retrievers and moms doing Stroller Fit exercises. The juxtaposition of conflicting genres had a twilight zone effect on me. My bathroom supplies, my nettle stings, my poetry notes, and my self trouped along the picaresque river full of swans and great blue herons and back to my academic cell.

What with the poetry, the grocery store, the Travelers, and the river, I had such a strong feeling of being part of little human eddies of experience. I am part of a swirl of people in Limerick, in the middle of constant shift, perched on the edge of Europe, on the far west end of an island listening to old men tell stories about drinking wine in Egypt.