Six Of The Best

Gwen Orel Previews The Irish Arts Center's Inaugural PoetryFest

The Irish have a reputation for beautiful language, a "gift of gab" that infuses song lyrics, playwriting, fiction. It's natural then that Irish poetry is prized as some of the best in the English language. Still, while most literati will know the names Seamus Heaney and W.B. Yeats, many contemporary Irish poets are nearly unknown in New York. The Irish Arts Center's inaugural PoetryFest, on Saturday, November 7, aims to correct that gap-the festival of contemporary Irish poetry ever is the first New York has seen. Six contemporary poets will give readings, sign books and meet their public from 3pm on, with a Meet the Poets event midway through.

Glucksman Ireland House and Poetry Society of America also sponsor the day-long festival, which features poets Peter Sirr, Joseph Woods, Enda Wyler, Harry Clifton Eiléan Ní Chulleáin and Paula Meehan. The poets' travel from Ireland is supported by Culture Ireland as well as NYU Glucksman Ireland house.

The idea for the Fest originated from a chance conversation between Aidan Connolly, the Executive Director of Irish Arts Center, and Belinda McKeon, Irish playwright/journalist now living in New York, last year, the two explained last week in the lobby of IAC. McKeon, who writes for The Irish Times, curates DLR Poetry Now, Ireland's biggest poetry festival.

Connolly loved the idea as soon as he heard it. "When I have an opportunity to talk to an expert in a field, I pounce!" Still somewhat knew in the job, he says he knew he wanted to do a lot of literature at IAC, and he felt that poetry could impact not just the Irish community but the literary community as well. IAC has had poetry readings before, but a Fest, involving readings from six different poets, was something entirely new. The readings will be held on the Donaghy Theatre at the Irish Arts Center - having the poets actually on the stage will add to the day's sense of occasion and performance.

McKeon, who moved here four years ago, is eager to introduce New York audiences to these Irish poets, all of whom are at mid-career - all have a few volumes out. She is a writer but not a poet, and appreciates the way a poem "allows us to pin down what we're feeling. It's a chance to own our capacity of insight" - something she thinks is easy to lose in these days of multitasking and media overload. "I barely think in full sentences, I'm thinking in tweets," she explains. "Poetry is an opportunity for people to reconnect with their own intelligence."

These days, many bookstores no longer have poetry sections at all. For many, "poetry reading" summons memories of overheated wine and cheese hours with young professors earnestly reading poems about the tedium of being a young professor.

But poetry is not just for would-be poets, says Aengus Woods, the New York-based writer who co-curated the Fest with McKeon. "You can see the lively young people who slam poetry every week at the Nuyorican Poetry Café," he emailed. Poetry is for "anybody who has ever asked a question. It's for anybody who has ever said 'I wonder..'"

The Irish cliché of poetry has less to do with self-absorption than a perception that "poetry is rooted in useless nostalgia," says McKeon. That is not the case of the work of the poets in the Fest, whose writing is "exploding the notion of working with familiar imagery. Their new work goes far beyond the crutches of the rain and the bog."

The six poets together present a snapshot of the various facets of modern Irish life and modern Irish poetry.

Harry Clifton draws on his time in Paris over a decade, drawing on culture outside of Ireland. Like several of the other poets reading, he's won multiple awards, including the Patrick Kavanagh Award.

Peter Sirr's poetry, says McKeon, looks at what's happening right now in Ireland. His poetry is also personal, looking at the birth of his daughter. Enda Wyley also looks at becoming a new mother - and the mother of Sirr's daughter, as the poets are married to each other. Joseph Woods, the youngest of the poets, Director of Poetry Ireland, lived in Japan, and his poetry is full of wry humor, taking an arch look at contemporary Ireland.

Paula Meehan, who has six collections of poetry, and writes of Dublin's innercity, often with a tone of elegy, says McKeon. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, also a Patrick Kavanagh Award winner, uses myth and memory to create a sort of ethical poetry.

While poets and poetry are loved on both sides of the Atlantic, there are differences. McKeon remembers having to learn ten poems by heart in school. She's seen lines around the block for poetry readings here, which she has never seen in Ireland. There are greater academic opportunities for poets in the US.

Observes Peter Sirr, speaking by telephone from Dublin, "American poets work in universities, teaching creative writing. That doesn't happen so much here." On the other hand, there are far fewer offers here of the sort that the state organization aosdána, gives to poets, what he describes as "the equivalent of a grant to get you by."

But in Ireland, as in the US, hardly anyone makes a living from writing poetry. Still "In Ireland, it's a curious thing, lots of poets, fantastic numbers, poetry Ireland organizes readings all around the country. If only the poets read poetry and went to poetry readings you'd have a big enough audience. There's an appetite for it in Ireland, for the idea of the poet, that's very much embedded in culture here." His book The Thing Is just come out with Gallery Press - on a night that the publishers launched five other volumes of poetry as well.

Enda Wyley speculates that poetry may be very important to the Irish "because of people like like W.B. Yeats, Joyce, Beckett. We have so many Nobel prizes for such a small country - when Seamus Heaney won Nobel prize it was absolute jubilation... they had one of his poems on the hour on the radio... it was a bit like the angelus."

But the poetry community is more and more borderfree, she thinks. "The community of poets is quite small, even globally. Once you start writing, it snowballs, you meet other writers and poets. Ireland is a bit like a village; poets know each other and follow each others' careers." She brought out her fourth collection this year, titled To Wake to This. She and Sirr have written poems in parallel about the birth of their daughter, but she explains, their poems are very different: "he's more cerebral, I'm more 'write from the heart,' I write spontaneously. I teach as well, and am children's writer too...I write quite speedily and quickly." Though they live in the same house, and "meet in the kitchen for dinner and breakfast," she explains that they "stay away from each other when it comes to poetry."

There is no end to where our poems go -
anywhere to be free, not to be trapped
in these fine and beautiful books
that are hungry for a scribble,
a dream, the rush of a word.
- excerpt from "Notebook Shop," in To Wake to This, by Enda Wyley

Sirr says, "My latest book is kind of a crazy schizophrenic middle aged book, divided by joy and celebration, and birth of our daughter, then the usual kind of misery, sections on darker realities, war..." Poetry, he says, has "some sort of visceral excitement, what you can do with the language, some sort of electricity-that leads to some sort of truth."

The pubs are heaving,
stags and hens, bright buses bear
the sleepless to the suburbs, the conspirators
go over the details of the plan again.
It looks good. Silken Thomas, Isolde's eyelids.
Where is the other side of the street?
- excerpt from "In the Beginning," in The Thing Is, by Peter Sirr

For Connolly, the Irish reputation for beautiful language is "a brand," something that can be a source of pride but can also turn into a stereotype. McKeon hopes that the Poetry Fest will show how that notion of lyricism is being "used and interrogated." It's a refusal, she says, of taking any concept of Irishness for granted. As Ireland broadens its cultural perspective, writes Woods, its poets now write about "an Ireland that is part of a global picture."

The busy-ness of life doesn't leave much time for reflection-that's where poetry, with its impulse to crystallize a moment of experience, comes in. McKeon smiles. "People think they're too busy to come to readings, but when they do come, it's radiant."