Poetry

I don’t usually have much time for John Waters, but I liked what he said when he spoke at the opening of Eigse Micheal Harnett last week, along with Michael Cody, whose writing I have always admired. Eigse commemorates the late Michael Hartnett, who wrote poetry in English and later in Irish.

What Waters said about the role of poetry, and the arts generally, as disrupting ‘official thought’ which tries to channel us into conformity has probably been said before, but certainly bears repetition. Waters spoke of the artist as a voice that ‘is unsafe, telling us the truth’ and once which touches the ‘primal sense of ourself’ My engagement with poetry has been thin in the past decade, but what he said certainly resonated with things in my teaching of history, in which I warn students that I teach outside their comfort zone in terms of the teaching process. The ‘official’ frame for university teaching still depends too much on the model of expert at the front dictating notes to sleepy students in a lecture; I base entire courses around simulations – games if you prefer.

Cody spoke, along with a great many other sensible things about craft, about the ‘souls need for story’ which fits in with the narrative tradition in history, which has recently enjoyed a resurgence. Across a range of disciplines, the importance of narrative as the way we understand things is now recognised. He also spoke of how ‘we are all becoming shades’, emhasising he transient nature of the human condition, and I suppose this links to how we seek to understand our place in a greater story, a metanarrative or a grand narrative if you like, as a way to achieve meaning in the face of death. I wasn’t so happy with Cody’s suggestion that the only way to overcome our transience was through ‘love’ – he sounded a bit like a Sunday sermon for a moment, but he is a smart guy, and I’m sure he if we have the chance to unwrap his use of the word, we would find a much wider meaning.

I met Hartnett, who died in 1999, a couple of times. I saw him read, with a glass of whiskey on the table so full it brimmed over the lip. He used to do a radio slot on poetry and interviewed me at Writers Week one year – it must have been ’81 or ’82. Back then I wrote poetry in English, some of which is truly cringeworthy, and struggled to write some in Irish with the aid of a dictionary. I’m not sure it belongs in the same company as the rest of this posting, but here is a page scan of one of the Irish ones, and also of some of the English stuff, one of which has a bit of handwritten editing which improves it be cutting.