LIKE Seamus Heaney, I went to a school where you learned poems by memorising them and, again like him, one of the poems I absorbed in this way was Keats's "Ode to Autumn". However, all these years later, I couldn't recite it to you off the top of my head, which he can - and did in the Royal Irish Academy of Music a few nights ago.
Well, almost. Midway through the second stanza, he faltered slightly and had to be prompted by a couple of people, after which he continued victoriously to the end - and it should be pointed out that the prompters had the advantage of the text in front of them.
The text was contained in the RIAM's First Anthology of Poetry, and if you're wondering why a musical academy is publishing an anthology of verse, I should point out that the Local Centre Examination System, which is organised by the RIAM, annually tests over 30,000 students throughout the country in speech, drama and verse-speaking.
Compiled and edited by Margaret Turley, and with an introduction by RIAM director John O'Conor, the anthology (£6 from bookshops) contains over 120 poems in English and more than 80 in Irish. There are little-known as well as famous poems here - I was especially pleased to note the inclusion of a poem by Ford Madox Ford, generally and rightly regarded as a great novelist and editor but very underrated as a poet. (Incidentally, Ms Turley lists him as Ford Madox Hueffer which, though quaint-sounding today, is strictly correct - he didn't change his name to Ford until 1919, after this particular poem was written).
At the launch, Seamus Heaney spoke eloquently about learning poems "by heart" and by "saying them into yourself" - beautiful phrases, he said, enshrining beautiful notions. I, too, believe in such notions, though they appear to be out of fashion in the leaching of poetry nowadays, and while the Keats would defeat me, I could recite James Elroy Flecker's "The Old Ships" (also in the anthology) and many other poems from my schooldays without a bother.
"Why does a book so loved by readers arouse in writers, critics and other literary professionals such irrational loathing?"
This is the question posed by Patrick Curry in the Commentary column of the much-improved (less rantingly lefty) New Statesman, and the work he is talking about is Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, which was recently voted book of the century in the Waterstone's readers' poll, much to the dismay of Germaine Greer, Auberon Waugh and others, this writer included.
Part of the answer, Mr Curry thinks, was supplied by Philip Pullman last summer when, awarding the Carnegie Prize for children's fiction, he observed that straightforward storytelling had been marginalised in what Mr Curry calls "the self-consciously clever world of adult literary fiction". Warming to this argument, he pointed out that Walter Benjamin, no less, observed that "the first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales" and that Tolkien himself declared the fairy story to be an adult genre "for which a starving audience exists".
However, Mr Curry goes one step further. Unlike Ruskin and Chesterton, who lectured everyone on the dangers of the modern world, Tolkien "wove his anti-modernism into a rich and intricate narrative that presents an alternative. In this version, as in ours, community (the hobbits and the Shire), the natural world (Middle-earth itself) and spiritual values (symbolised by the Sea) are all under threat from the pathological union of stale-power, capital and technological science that is Mordor...Tolkien addressed the fears of late-20th-century readers and gave them hope. Far from being escapist or reactionary, The Lord of the Rings addresses the greatest struggle of this century and beyond."
Armed with this exciting insight, I decided to give The Lord of the Rings another try, but, nope, I still couldn't gel beyond the first chapter. All that ultra-modernist relevance was obviously just too much for me.
NEXT Wednesday evening in the Firkin Crane Cultural Centre at Shandon in Cork city, poet Aidan Murphy will be reading froth his latest collection, Stark Naked Bhes, published by New Island Books. I'm assured that this fourth volume by the 44-year-old is as unflinching and provocative as contemporary Irish poetry comes - giving voice, in the words of Poetry Ireland's Noel Duffy, "to the misfits and maniacs of society who are - in the title of Murphy's favourite movie - down by law."
Not my favourite movie by a long shot, and personally I've had my fill of misfits and maniacs down through the years, but if you're in the vicinity of Cork and want to experience someone at the cutting edge of poetry - as the reviewer of a previous volume claims Aidan Murphy to be - don't say you weren't told. Admission is a mere £3, and the starting time is 8pm.
IF you're a fiction writer with a book published between March 1st 1996 and March 1st 1997, you just might win £4,000 in the Kerry Ingredients Book of the Year. The adjudicators are Colm Toibin and Edna O'Brien, the award will be presented at this year's Listowel Writers' Week, and all you have to do is enter.