One of the hazards of working in Poetry Ireland is that we run the constant danger of becoming so involved in the provision of services to audiences, and to poets and poetry, that we can end up jaded, caught on the wrong side of what Walter Benjamin called the commodification of art. It's the besetting danger of arts administration, I suppose. What aims at pleasure and instruction can become a game of budgets, deadlines, typesetting, advertising, logistics and management. What saves us, time and time again, are poems. Beautiful, stubborn, irreducible, autonomous poems.
Somebody raises their head in the buzzing confusion of the office and says "here, listen to this" - it might be from a new collection, it might be a submission to Poetry Ireland Review from someone we've not yet heard of, but the effect is directly and simply to remind us of what we are most about. It's like that, too, at readings, when somebody from the audience comes up to show their poems, or somebody quotes a line, a verse or a whole poem that they have taken to heart.
We all have our stories of unlikely revelations. One of my own favourites concerns the taxi driver rushing me to the Galway train who got all excited when he heard I would be meeting Rita Ann Higgins later that evening. "Tell you what, pal, this one is on the house. But, would you ever ask that Rita Ann to write a poem about taxi drivers?" A free taxiride for an unwritten poem, and he thought it was a bargain. We tell all kinds of tall tales about ourselves in Ireland these days, all kinds of self-serving stories about how we care for our culture, our environment, our children, our poor. We also, even if it's by accident, tell true stories, and one of those is that we value poetry. Astonishingly perhaps, we do.
It occurred to us that it might be interesting to challenge our own anecdotal knowledge here, to find out what poets and poems people actually like and cherish. And so here they are: the 100 Irish poems the people of Ireland care most about, and have taken to their hearts. We had 3,000 votes, more than half of them by email, a considerable number from overseas. We thought we'd be flooded by Yeats, and we were; we expected a great deal of Heaney, and we got it; we figured Kavanagh would make a brave showing, and Anon, and perhaps Goldsmith, on the strength of The Deserted Village.
We were right in much of our expectation, but Anon let us down, turned up only once. Isn't that odd? People have heads full of poems, and they remember their authors! How true is that of songs, for instance? Padraic Pearse made a good showing, as did Austin Clarke and Louis Mac Neice, and if there was a preponderance of poems obviously learned in school, well, that's interesting in itself; it suggests, doesn't it, that there's something to be said for rote learning? It's good to see Cathal Bui Mac Giolla Ghunna, Raifteri, Sean O Riordain and Eibhlin Dubh Ni Chonaill featuring, along with O Rathaille and O Direain, but it's a conservative listing, and our contemporary poets in Irish are by and large absent. Flann O'Brien did surprisingly well, and we were pleased to see Paul Muldoon, Pat Ingoldsby, Tom Kettle and Katharine Tynan show up, but not many contemporary poems have made their way into the popular mind on this showing, though I would be surprised if they had. It's a mysterious, slow alchemy, the way poems insinuate themselves into the mind of the tribe.
Only three poems by women make it to the list, which would be a greater disappointment were it not that women have only recently begun to be published in the numbers which might lead us to expect that this list will be very different in 10 years' time.
In some ways what pleased us most about this exercise in trawling through the national mind was the list we came up with when we counted which poets, as opposed to which poems, had been most often nominated. That list is also reproduced here, and what strikes one forcibly is that seven of the 10 most voted-for poets are among our contemporaries, proof positive of the extent to which a living poetry is part of lives today.
Theo Dorgan is a poet, and director of Poetry Ireland.