A Weary Spring-start

Sorry that there hasn't been much going on in here for a while, but I've been under the weather. The weather as in cold - it plays havoc with my shoulders, and a long standing stiffness that I have (no sniggering at the back there). Basically the colder it gets, the stiffer I get and it got to the stage that I couldn't move out of my bed for a couple of days.

But on the bright side, I got to read at the new Brat Bride Dundalk festival last Sunday, which featured, weirdly, another Bee Smyth, and the Poetry Chicks. I'm already a big fan of these girls (and Conor the pianist), as I've seen them and met them at Flatlake and Electric Picnic last year, where I read too (part of the ever-changing Poetry Divas, don't ya know). They moved the audience with their rousing aural-work and got genuine gasps and wows - what more could you ask for.

Now, in an aside, I've heard tell that Flatlake is moving its dates to June - anyone know anything about this?

In other news, it's competition time again - Strokestown has passed, but there's still time to enter Wigtown in Scotland, they don't close until Friday 12th, and there's word from Cavan, about the Cavan Crystal Poetry Competition which opens its doors to Adults this year. €10 for three poems and it closes March 31st. Bridport is of course open once again, plenty of time to think about your entries of either short stories or poems - but I'd given up on them because it is such a big/high-class field. Still, time to think outside the box, eh?

What else do you be doing when spring is a-coming in, but clear the decks of that stuff you've been a-writing ;)

Michelle's Peony Favourite Poetry Books 2009

Michelle of Peony Moon has a great series running just now: writers with their favourite books of 2009.

Part 5 includes my choices, but not my whys... more on this rumination later. As you can guess, I was hard pushed to actually nail three, never mind six - there are so many great poetry books out there.

If you were stuck for a Christmas present for someone who likes poetry, and wanted to get them something out of the usual for Christmas, you could do a lot worse than browse these lists and google the results. It just shows you there's some mighty fine poetry out there...

StAnza virtual poetry fest

Have a look at the post on Colin Will's blog about tomorrow, Saturday 14th's web festival of poetry, brought to you by the folks at StAnza.

They're beaming in live poetry from all over the world, from Mumbai, India to Sacramento, USA and everywhere in between, by satellite to St Andrews and then it's simultaneouly being webcast - so you can enjoy the action from the comfort of your own laptop.

StAnza website is here The festival kicks off at 1pm and finishes at around 10pm with live music etc to close. Remember this is a live stream; there won't be any catching up if you've missed anything, but you can tune in at any stage during the day.

Colin has the full line up in his post, mentioned above, along with poems, pics and translations. Do check out this exciting virtual poetry festival if you can, Saturday!

Teaching and Writing - do they mix?

I've been super-duper busy since the beginning of September - the observant among you can't have failed to notice the dearth of posts here. Why? Well, I got hours teaching for Navan VEC, as well as getting my own Saturday Creative Writing classes back up and running again (in a lovely new venue, DKIT).

So something had to give; the writing. And there's the rub. If I don't write, I don't have material to work on or send out. If I don't write, I don't develop all the ideas I have percolating away. If I don't write, I start to feel a little bit nuts.

I have just been coming back to the idea of writing this last few days - that must mean that I'm getting used to the teaching - thank goodness. And I still have one unused week from my residential bursary coming up: on the mid-term break. I should feel a little guilty about going off to write for a week at Annaghmakerrig and abandoning my husband to the six mini-monsters (okay, kids), but the truth is, I don't have time to feel guilty about it.

In that magical place I'll have the space to think, walk, eat, write and fool around with words, but more importantly I'll have the space to get three mini-projects nailed that have been rocketing around my brain for the last three weeks. The best thing about having to drive to Navan from Dundalk is the head space it allows for me to think. No time wasted, eh?

I can't bloody wait!

Nick Laird & Dishwasher Sagas

As ever, I am a whole week behind: the kids have been off this week on mid-term breaks and the whole household has descended into the sort of chaos that only mothers know: washing to beat the band etc; constantly running out of food and trying to think of 'free' activities that involve exercise of some form. And then the dishwasher which was already getting very weepy, tired and emotional decided that since I'd got a few euros to spare it was time to sputter and blink it's death.

Cue a few interesting days of manual dish washing, in which the kids learned very quickly that 'hands that do dishes' should be anyone's but their own. The new DW was installed yesterday with the usual three hour saga, involving sawing, hacking and much swearing that accompanies any seemingly plain and simple job in our house...

In the midst of all this a friend sent me a link for Nick Laird's article in last week's Guardian.

Laird discusses the political poem, coming from the stance of hearing Elizabeth Alexander's inauguration poem and mentioning Robert Frost's inaugural poem back in 1961 (for JFK). There is a tightrope that has to be walked when you decide to write poetry about politics: "To watch words carefully is a small political act, a safeguard against doublespeak. In daily discourse it leads to questions about truth and power." Laird suggests that 'poetry and politics' is interchangeable with that other unhappy pairing of words, 'imagination and reality.' From reading Wallace Steven's lecture 'The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,' he argues that Stevens thought that perhaps a 'coalition' between the two worlds was/is possible.

Now, I bet you never thought you'd see Nick Laird, poetry and politics and a dishwasher all in the same post. No, neither did I.

Poetry in a Talent Show

Young DCU student Holly Ann Treanor will be on TV on Sunday night, in RTE's All Ireland Talent show. I don't watch a lot of TV at all, and it was a friend who put me on to this, but it's fascinating to see a poetry act being featured on television. Have a look at her audition clip and see what you think.

Project Verse

Are you a fan of Project Runway? Are you a poet without a first collection to your credit yet? Are you not freaked out by seeing these two things in one paragraph?

Then Project Verse could be just the challenge for you!

Hurry along and read up the rules and see whether you could be in with a chance of winning a contract for a published chapbook, a weeklong residency at Soul Mountain Retreat in Connecticut, an interview with Joe Milford of 'The Joe Milford Poetry Show', and a review of your chapbook in ouroboros review and Limp Wrist. It doesn't say where you have to be from... so, who knows? :)

Bridport - Already!

The Bridport Prize 2009

International Creative Writing Competition for Short Stories and Poems

The Bridport Prize 2009 website is now open for entries!

The Bridport Prize is the richest open writing competition in the English language -
with £5000 first prize for a short story (of up to 5000 words); and £5000 first
prize for a poem (of up to 42 lines).

The Bridport is also known as a tremendous literary stepping stone - the first
step in the careers of writers such as: Kate Atkinson, Tobias Hill, Carol Ann Duffy
and Helen Dunmore.

Anyone can enter - so long as the work is previously unpublished. It costs £7 per
story or £6 per poem and the closing date is 30th June 2009.

Each year the prize is judged by well known writers - this year we are delighted to have

Ali Smith judging short stories and Jackie Kay judging poetry.

* I wonder how robust your short stories will have to be to get past Ali Smith - yikes!

The 2008 anthology of winning entries is available for just £12 or £15 overseas
(including postage and packing)

2006 & 2007 anthologies available for £7 or £10 overseas (limited amount)


Enter online or download an entry form www.bridportprize.org.uk

Carson in the Guardian

Many thanks to Ms Baroque for this link to an interview with Ciaran Carson, at home as the photograph shows, beside a great lick of a fire.

I've enjoyed the interview immensely, as I had the honour and pleasure of working with him last spring in a series of classes on translation. In the interview he talks about growing up in Belfast as a member of an Irish speaking family in the 40s. He also mentions that lovely word 'capall;' Irish for horse, which he had us so in love with when we all tried our hand at a translation of a poem, 'Malairt,' (loosely rendered The Swap) by Séan Ó Ríordáin (think I might have posted that on PFFA during April...).

How we struggled with that one, trying it out in English: I always got the feeling there was something in the original that we weren't rendering, and Prof Carson did say that a lot of it had to do with the word 'capall' as well as the word 'bron,' (loosely given as sorrow). Because the words sound the way they do, they have a different association in your mind, a wider feeling of the horseness of horse, or the sorrowfulness of sorrow, but if you're used to thinking of it in Irish first, there must be a strangeness about the English word... anyway.

Not content with that, we also had a close look at Baudelaire's poem 'Correspondances' a poem that seemed to be so much more than it's component parts and that almost yielded a larger meaning to you before slipping away. I also heard Prof Carson describing how he tackled his translation of Dante's Inferno; to him it's about the rhythm as much as anything: he spoke of how Dante composed his poem whilst walking from place to place in Italy - but I digress a little.

I love what Carson says about words: 'Heft. They have heft...and they've got a life of their own.' This ties into an article by Hannah Brooks-Motl, I've been reading about reading poems, particularly the poems that emanate from the 'elliptical' school of poetry in the US (and now elsewhere). The article from The Dark Horse, Summer 2008 is the sort of thing that I like to read over and over again, thinking about other things that connect into the idea of how we read poems, and how the elliptical style of poetry, where poem that don't necessarily connect up in the mind of the reader have been considered difficult to interpret.

Words are tied to experience: all the words you've ever heard have complex connections made all the way back to your early childhood and beyond, possibly even in the womb. It is childhood that usually serves as a rich repository for the poems that I try to write now; poems and stories about potatoes, about cows and calves, but I also keep coming back to growing up along the north side of the bordern as an outsider, and trying to make sense of the occupation and strife of the 70s too.

I think that we all keep a huge hinterland of knowledge that we use when we read poems that aren't opaque, that don't yield meaning straight away. Putting things together in a manner that doesn't seem to make sense, forces the reader to use their own synaptic connections between their knowledge stores: it is in all of us to want to try and divine a pattern and smooth the bumps of our own interpretation and reading. That is what I think gives me pleasure when reading poetry. Well, that and a whole pile of other things like rhythm as well as all the poetic panoply of devices there are. Oh, and time.

Above all though, what really helps me is when I hear a poet talk about their work, and read it; or indeed as Prof Carson often did in class, sing and play his flute for us, as he must have done in the Guardian interview. It allows you a rich layering when you hear how someone has lived, what their interests were and how they are always trying to hear things in a new way, using the language of now, overlaid by the language of the past. As Carson says: 'language, when explored with humility, is always deeper and more accurate than what the author thought he had in mind.' Carson may have never left Belfast other than for visiting other places, but in his mind he has roamed the wide world over.

Poetry Ireland News

Poetry Ireland have their latest roundup of events, news and competition titbits. There's a bit about the judging panel for the Strokestown Poetry Competition (John F Deane, Joe Woods, Penelope Shuttle and Máire Ní Annracháin); closing date 22nd January.

If you click here you can download it yourself (it's a pretty quick download), and have a browse through it. Do have a look at the winning poem from the Ledwidge competition, 'Scooter'; it was written by Catherine Ann Cullen; a fellow Doghouse poet, whose collection 'A Bone in my Throat,' was launched in the same year as my own: 2007. Hugh O'Donnell is another Doghouse poet (from the same year), whose article on Poetry Aloud, the national children's poetry reading competition is a lovely inspiration.

It seems we are often out of the Doghouse these days ;) (okay enough puns for today!).

Oh bugger

Some poems come easier than others. Usually they come after about three or four aborted attempts, when you've stopped thinking about what it is that you were trying to put into a poem. That doesn't make them any less hard-earned though. I seem to remember Richard Hugo talking about this in his book, The Triggering Town. That book is a collection of essays on poetry and is well worth getting. I remember buying Strunk & White at the same time... gosh, four years ago now, oh dearie me, how much poetry water has flowed past the bridge now, eh?

Well, tomorrow I'm on Dundalk FM again , Wednesday 7th January, talking about the Bursary I won and maybe reading a few poems, at 10:45 To listen via the internet, click on this link, and then click on the second 'Click Here' in the second paragraph.

I would give you the link directly but blogger is playing silly buggers. I will try and record it later on, if I can... I might pop in a poem tomorrow when I'm not feeling so critical.