Rock 'n' roll with poet Lowell: The publication last year of Robert Lowell's Collected Poems prompted an interesting response from literary journal Metre. In its recent issue, Metre carries accounts by various writers and academics about how and when they first encountered the American colossus.
For Seán Lysaght, it was as a second-year student at UCD in 1976. "In those days we arts students were politically very left wing and therefore anti-American. I found it perversely gratifying to witness the respectable world of New England falling apart in the person of Robert Lowell." With Denis Donoghue in charge of the English Department at the time, American academic authority loomed large but here, writes Lysaght, was a poet subverting all the bourgeois decencies of the Ivy League world. Some of the work had the swagger of rock lyrics and, for Lysaght, Lowell would not have been out of place reciting on the stage at Woodstock; it was all, he adds, a very partial view of "the helpless figure Lowell eventually became, kept going by the munificence and forbearance of the academic establishment."
David Wheatley opens his submission by declaring that "a pummelling round the ears with 'Waking Early Sunday Morning', 'Sailing Home from Rapallo' or 'The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket' is not something a young reader easily gets over". Let's agree, he suggests, that Lowell is one of the very few modern poets who can produce that kind of effect, not once, but over and over. But, he says, "Collected Poems would be a vastly improved book if Lowell could have spent the journey tossing the logomaniac narcissist inside him overboard". Others contributing to the exercise are John McAuliffe, Michael Hinds, Peter Denman, Dennis O'Driscoll and Evan Rail.
Metre, No. 15. Spring, 2004. 10
Kavanagh goes national
It's good to see that Monaghan and Dublin, his two great haunts, aren't going to hog the centenary of Patrick Kavanagh's birth. Instead, a national day in the poet's honour will take place on July 18th in other counties including Galway, Clare, Louth, Tipperary, Armagh and Cork - specifically in waterway locations. It is planned that the events will take place every July from now on, on the second Sunday of the month. It's inspired by his poem, 'Lines Written On a Seat at the Grand Canal, Dublin'. The poem mentions mid-July, a reference to the summer of 1955 when Kavanagh was recuperating from a lung operation while sitting by the banks of the Grand Canal. "This recovery period was a crucial time of illumination for Kavanagh, which he referred to as an artistic rebirth," says Emily Cullen, programme director of the Kavanagh Centenary Celebrations, who is the person to contact if you're interested in organising a Kavanagh Day.
Meanwhile, another highlight of the centenary, the Raglan Road Festival, will take place in Inniskeen from July 31st to August 1st, where the finale will be provided by The Saw Doctors. John Montague, Christine Dwyer Hickey and Tom McIntyre are among the writers taking part in a very varied programme that includes George Murphy of You're a Star and the Terry Woods Band performing songs by The Pogues and the Dubliners.
The Patrick Kavanagh Centre, Inniskeen, Co Monaghan. Telephone: 042- 9378560. E-mail: infoatpkc@eircom.net
www.patrickkavanaghcountry.com
Concert for Said
Edward Said will be honoured at a memorial concert at the Barbican Concert Hall in London on August 4th. Organised by the London Review of Books, to which Said contributed for more than 20 years, it will feature the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra under conductor Daniel Barenboim. Said and Barenboim set up the orchestra in 1999 with the aim of giving young Arabs and Israelis the chance to perform and work together and to learn from some of the world's best orchestral musicians. www.barbican.org.uk
First words in print
Early adventures in publishing is the theme of a sequence of essays in the current issue of The Stinging Fly. Poet Dennis O'Driscoll writes of how the first national journal which carried his work as a teenager was Young Citizen, the magazine for schools; his epistle being a letter to the editor denouncing inflationary wage demands in Ireland. Poet Enda Wyley, inspired by Brendan Kennelly who visited her school in Dalkey, Co Dublin, remembers when one of the poems he encouraged her to write won a competition and was published in the RTÉ Guide, while novelist Keith Ridgway, who says he used to be a poet, ruminates on his first published piece, 'Swimming', which appeared in the Sunday Tribune in 1988. At work someone pinned it up in the canteen where colleagues were convinced it was about sex. "This was news to me, though in retrospect probably accurate."
The Stinging Fly - Dublin's Literary Magazine. No 18. Summer, 2004. 6