Episode 12 The Arts Show

Hello and welcome to The Arts Show.

Tonight, we shine a light on Northern Ireland's

vibrant poetry scene.

I'm here at the Sunflower bar on Belfast's Union Street

to meet a group called The Lifeboat

who meet here to air and share new writing.

I'm very excited about what we're going to hear tonight,

so I would like you to welcome Padraig Reagan.

The chef will shake your hand Talk in a hammed-up French accent

Speak carefully, tell him to use lots of butter, tarragon,

Just a twist of lemon juice

Remember that whatever happens next is entirely his choice

If you have followed my instructions exactly

He'll show you down a corridor to a small, dark room

Take out the lemons you have been hiding in your bag

Arrange them on the huge, gold plate on the floor

Lie down and wait.

-APPLAUSE

-Thank you.

For over a year now, The Lifeboat has hosted

a series of readings in quirky venues around Belfast.

It's a chance for an established poet

and an emerging poet to stand together on the same stage

to read new writing in front of a live audience.

With me are the co-founders of Lifeboat -

Stephen Connolly and Manuela Moser.

Why do something like this?

I guess we just had a lot of very talented friends

writing very good poems that weren't necessarily being given an outlet.

We just thought that we needed to do something

that was a little bit different.

And also part of what you do is that you've taken the title

of your poetry readings from a Michael Longley poem,

The Lifeboat, why that?

Who's the Longley fan?

Well, we both are. We both are.

But with that poem, Michael's inspiration,

for want of a better word, was something about the redemptive

quality of fraternity, or sorority or some sort of communal feeling.

We wanted to do something similar.

It wasn't just about having a main act and a support act.

It was about some sort of balance between

the person who hasn't published anything yet and the person who has.

And, while these are all friends here in this bar tonight,

how do you get the people who say, "I don't understand poetry"?

How do you get them to come here?

What we try to do is...

..to undo some of the ideas that people might have of poetry -

about what a poem means and what it does.

But we're trying to suggest that if you allow the stuff itself

to breathe, to give it a stage that's of its own making...

We're not patronising anyone, you know?

-We just want the stuff to stand for itself.

-Thank you very much.

Now, in January of this year, Sinead Morrissey won the TS Eliot Prize,

possibly the biggest prize in British poetry.

She joins Ciaran Carson, Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney

and Paul Muldoon as the fifth Northern Irish poet

to pick up the award.

Having certain poems in my life - that feels like a gift.

I think that's why I love learning poems by heart and having them,

because I own them then.

That their days were not like our days

The different people who lived in sepia

More buttoned, colder, with slower wheels

Shut off, sunk back, in the unwakeable house

For all we call and knock.

Going back to primary school days, coming into contact with poetry

was a visceral, uplifting, exhilarating experience.

When I was 10, 11, I fell under the spell of Edgar Allen Poe.

And my father started reciting The Raven one day at the dinner table.

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping

As of someone gently rapping, rapping on my chamber door.

It's designed to cast a spell.

I'd never come across anything as exciting as that.

Then I started to write and I took it very seriously.

I took it very seriously. I was absolutely convinced.

And even the man with the box and the flaming torch

Who made his servants stand so still Their faces itched

Can't offer us what it cost to watch the foreyard being lost

To cream and shadow The pierced sky placed in a frame

Irises under the windowsill were the colour of ancient Rome.

I am Poet Laureate for Belfast for this year, and the biggest, central

part of that role has been being involved in outreach activities.

It is intensified language, which has potentially more power than

other kinds of language to say truths and to affect our lives directly.

I think it is very vibrant and alive in Belfast, as a city.

That's very exciting, it's a reason to be here.

All of my last four books were shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize.

That is amazing to have been shortlisted so many times,

but on the other hand, I was getting really sick of being shortlisted.

And my mother had said to me, I think after Through The Square Window didn't win, she said,

"Sinead, you will never win the TS Eliot Prize. It's never going to happen for you."

So then Parallax was shortlisted, and my mother was, like,

"Oh, here we go again," which is kind of how I felt about it.

Here we go again.

And then...yeah...

And then...I won.

It was amazing to have finally won it, having been in the running

so many times before. I feel very grateful towards the book.

That sounds a bit strange, but I think poems are given to you.

A lot of things happened around me that enabled me to write that book.

I think when you are writing,

self-consciousness about audience or consequence is really toxic.

And each poem is its own challenge, it's its own puzzle,

it's its own question that you need to resolve as best you can,

so you still need to take it on a poem-by-poem basis.

Where nothing was, then something

Six months ago Most of this was sludge

And a gangrenous slipway Dipping its ruined foot in the sea.

The joy of having a big poem on your hands,

and the level of absorption that it takes to bring it to completion

is easily the most important thing in my life, that activity.

A single rusted gantry, marking the spot where a small town's population

of Protestant men built a ship the size of the Empire State Building

Smashed cars and wreckers' yards flourished in between.

Sinead Morrissey. And Sinead is here.

-Sinead, there is a genuine energy in this room.

-I know.

I know! It's so buzzy and exciting, isn't it? It's fantastic.

This is the community in Belfast that exists for poetry.

And if you look around the room, it's not people of a certain age

or a certain background, it's all kinds of people.

Because you said in the film that Belfast

and the poetry scene was the reason that you stayed rooted here.

-So this is it.

-This is it. Isn't this just so exciting?

You're like a proud mammy with this fellow.

I am a bit like a proud mother. I know I shouldn't be.

Padraig, you are actually Sinead's student.

Yes. I have been for two years now.

And the fact of Sinead winning the TS Eliot Prize,

how significant has that been for local poets?

There's just been a general sense of excitement around Queen's

and around the Heaney Centre since then.

And a sense of reinforcing, as well,

in the chasm that was left in Seamus Heaney's death,

that something is still happening here,

that there is an energy to Northern Irish poetry.

There still is a terrific energy, and I think Padraig's amazing reading

tonight of his wonderful, wonderful poems is evidence

of this strength of talent among the younger generation coming up.

I mean, it is really something to be inspired by.

I know you've won the TS Eliot prize,

and that's great and all, but can I possibly ask you to sign my copy?

Because this is probably...

this could be like Heaney's Eleven Poems in years to come.

And people like this, does this make your job worthwhile, Sinead?

It makes my job a complete privilege.

Padraig comes to me for supervisions and all I say is,

-"I can teach you nothing."

-Thank you so much.

Sinead Morrissey, Padraig Regan, thank you both.

Now, another young poet to watch is Nathaniel Joseph McAuley.

His work is full of strong colours,

inspired by life in other parts of the world.

The Art Show caught up with him.

The voice is such a powerful tool, you know, and when I write,

I read everything out loud first and I write out loud, to be written down.

Milk snakes (those banded black and white on oranging red)

Enter the nests of cardinals in hatching season

Be on the watch for the mother's ochre feathers

Cast on the floor of the maple groves

And the upwards whoop

And vermillion smear of the orbiting father when hunting orphaned eggs.

I'd started off with the title poem, which is The Dyer's Notes On Indigo.

The dyer is going to have a more sensitive or a more heightened

notion of colour.

To take one character,

to take one voice that isn't necessarily my own and work

with that for four, five, six months,

it puts you in this wonderful place.

You're able to search yourself but once removed

Remembering your mother at times of relative stillness

Take the egg from a cruet of water Kept lukewarm on the mantle

And wrapped in cotton Cradle it in your breast pocket.

A lot of my research was in the Caribbean

and in Irish slavery in the Caribbean.

The Dyer's Notes kind of went everywhere, then.

I suppose displacing yourself as a poet is quite a...

quite an exciting thing.

You will make-believe the shell is vellum-thin

Feeling shifts like pupils on fingers through eyelids

Knowing your smell when hatched

The bird will seldom leave your shoulder.

Cinnabar is a reddy-orange colour

and it has been applied the world round as a really significant colour.

It is the colour of the cardinal bird

in the southern states of America.

It's the colour of the Cardinals' vestments in the church.

And it is just the most vibrant life-affirming colour I know.

Fill your cage instead with seeds for kumquat and tomato

Vines which will not yield before clearing the wire work

Its tiny slats implying the fruit impossibly big

The orange making scarlet of the red The red peach of the orange

Children pull at sari hems to stop and consider them.

Poetry is like any art.

It is somebody trying their best to make sense of something,

and when you read it, I think you do the same. You know?

I'm delighted to be introducing

Paula Cunningham to read for us this evening. Thank you.

APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

Hats.

My father wore a hat when I was little

We lived in Omagh O-M-A-G-Haitch

Or aitch as tribally decreed

He was a travelling salesman for ice cream, a Dublin firm

Hughes Brothers or HB

He was their Northern Ireland diplomat

He knew his clients well A studied discipline

Some would not buy Haitch-B ice cream on principle

My father had done his homework

To some he'd sell Aitch-B

To others HaitchB

One day in Derry/Londonderry

My father's car was hijacked

The men wore hats pulled down with holes for eyes and mouth

They held a gun They nudged his hat

They asked my father where we lived And ordered him to spell it

This year, I tried on voices just like hats.

Thank you.

Well, it is testimony to the pulling power of an event like this

that with me is Paula Meehan, the current Ireland Chair of Poetry,

and an established award-winning poet in your own right.

Do poets get a night off? Or were you dragged,

kicking and screaming to an event like this?

No, I think something like this

is a great intersection between the students and other writing groups,

without the walls, because there is a kind of joyous energy

coming from the poetry and the sense of dedication.

They are part of a very, very strong lineage of Northern Irish poets.

Do you see them fitting into the previous generations?

Well, you see the influences writ large,

but you also see this new energy, new voice that hasn't been mapped

and what they have to articulate

and the kind of work they have to do in language is new work,

because everything has changed in a place where language is so dangerous

and important and full of potential for healing, I would think.

So you see the young voices just pushing through all the confusions

and all the different persuasions and really singing their lyric out.

And they're not held back or tied down by the troubles or the weight

of expectation of being a troubles poet. It's history to them.

Its history, but I think they're still dealing with the aftermath

and with the underlying traumas and rifts, if you like.

And I think they're doing just extraordinary work in pushing out,

pushing ahead, and just the sense of potential here is marvellous.

Are poets always as rowdy as this?

-Oh, yeah! No, they're only warming up. Yeah.

-Thank you so much.

Well, once Northern Ireland's leading literary journal,

The Honest Ulsterman is being revived

after being dormant for nearly ten years.

Its new editor is Darran Anderson.

There has been a kind of tendency for poetry

to be regarded along the lines of gardening or, you know, therapy.

Poetry offers a view of life

that has complexity and ambiguity

and contradictions and mystery

and all the things that puritans and politicians are quite afraid of.

Poetry and poets in general, they offer something else, they offer the

ability to think outside these black and white conceptions of the world.

The Honest Ulsterman, in its original incarnation,

was very much an irreverent, challenging, innovative voice,

and it was also a platform for a generation of poets,

particularly from Ulster, who were just starting out.

Although it existed long before I was around,

I became aware of the presence of it and also the absence of it,

through interest in Seamus Heaney and Ciaran Carson and poets like that.

And I always felt that perhaps there was a vacuum there.

We want to hopefully bring back that outlet for other people.

We are starting it off as a website.

We're going to have interactive features with social media.

The original copies of The Honest Ulsterman are very pulpy,

as if they were passed along on street corners.

And I love that feel, seeing the newsprint,

seeing the old advertisements.

And if we can include something that has that feel,

that's very timely, then we're very keen to do that.

I think that the greatest poets for me,

and there's a lot of them in Northern Ireland at the moment,

are people who are really producing heavyweight art.

They can rank up there

with the greatest films and the greatest albums.

It has been proved recently by Sinead Morrissey's success,

that she's a major voice.

But there's a lot of poets are coming through with her -

Deirdre Cartmill, Stephanie Conn...

And also there's a few men thrown in there to make up the numbers!

In this first edition, we are very keen to provide a platform

for writers from here, and really put this generation coming through

on a world stage, in any way we can.

Michael Longley is one of our best-known poets

and a leading figure in Irish contemporary poetry.

He has written nine volumes of poetry

and later this year, a much-anticipated new collection comes out.

The Art Show filmed him in Belfast Castle,

overlooking the city he loves.

I have imagined an ideal death

in Charlie Gaffney's pub in Louisburgh;

He pulls me the pluperfect pint

As I, at the end of the bar next the charity boxes,

expire on my stool, head in hand, without a murmur.

This new group, The Lifeboat...

They've taken that from your poem.

That's in the last book - my A Hundred Doors.

Which is a poem about your death.

It is, in a way.

It is funny, though, about my death.

I've just helped him to solve his crossword puzzle,

And we commune with ancestral photos in the alcove

He doesn't notice that I am dead until closing time,

And he sweeps around my feet.

Michael achieved recognition as a poet in the 1960s

along with his contemporaries, Derek Mahon and Seamus Heaney.

They were guided by older poets like John Hewitt.

Have things now come full circle?

I like to think that Seamus and Derek and I

were part of something that you might call inspiration.

Do you think that you were touchstones for these generations?

I wouldn't be so bold as to suggest that.

Any good generation generates their own inner momentum.

And...it's a mixture of brotherly, sisterly, love and competition.

There's excitement in the room.

The air warms up, and there's a convection current,

and our souls rise on that.

Because, in a way, I still feel I'm their age.

I am still learning, I am still an aspiring poet.

I hate the notion of being anything approaching an elder statesman.

Do they remind you of yourself as a young writer?

They are much better organised,

but they do.

That's the way I felt about poetry then. When I was in my 20s.

The fact that you've got a new collection coming out,

there's a sense of vitality and rigour still with you.

Is it getting easier to write poetry or is it still...tough?

Is it getting easier...?

I...I don't really know.

All I can say is that the most exciting thing in the world

is when a poem comes along when you are working on it,

and there comes a point...

"I can't possibly screw this one up!"

And it's reaching the crest of the hill and then freewheeling down.

And... And that's just glorious!

But it's Charlie Gaffney

Who has died. Charlie, how do I buy a fishing licence?

Shall I let the dog out?

Would the fire take another sod?

The pub might as well be empty forever now. I launch

The toy lifeboat at my elbow with an old penny.

And Michael Longley's new poetry collection

The Stairwell is published on the 14th of August.

It was ten years ago that Leontia Flynn burst onto the scene

with her debut poetry collection These Days.

Two volumes later, she is one of the UK's most respected poets.

There's birds in my story

On the orange and brown linoleum lining the playroom

my infant self is playing with (that's right) dolls

A wave of salt tenderness picks up my mum where she stands,

carries her off with a lurch to some far, giddy shore,

then sets her back on her feet when I ask, can she whistle?

Poetry does choose you as a vocation.

You might try to choose it, it'll probably de-select you.

But it is a need that is real and urgent as any...

you know, I can think of.

She regards for a beat her fat second youngest child,

then purses her lips: Whee-whee, whee-whee, whee-whee.

I always did it, I was writing at 14.

Erm, I knew, I think, at 15, 16

I was fairly sure I wanted to write.

I can't remember ever not wanting to...or not needing to do it,

and it has been bubbling away at the back of my mind since I was 14.

You have experiences,

you have reactions and responses to things you live through

and they just... They need to be made into poems.

That's not to say it's something you express.

It's... I mean the ideas I have arrive in forms.

So I think, I could do this with that, that could...

That'll work like that.

And unless and until I've done it...

everything is an inconvenience.

At the mention of Gerard Manley Hopkins, my mild-mannered father -

tender, abstracted - would exercise the right to revert to type

That is to say: devout; that is, proscriptive. He would rather

we did not so bandy the good Jesuit's name about,

and talk of "gay this" and "gay that" - just as he would rather

my sister did not, from the library, request "sick" Lolita.

Poetry would hardly ever arrive as thoughts or a theme.

There is usually one or two things and it accumulates around that,

and you see the momentum and the overall thing

without seeing the words, which is very strange.

For instance, I might want to write a poem,

and have tried to do it for years about something,

but it doesn't work, because you're just trying to hammer away

and write it the way you'd write anything.

And then you just give up, and one day, six years later,

you know, it kind of falls into place.

As Hopkins was wont (his muse being bi(nsey) po(p)lar(s))

to swing from joy's heights, alas, to the abyss,

and for whom the mind had "mountains; cliffs of fall."

I do write things down, but mostly it's in my head.

I write on the page on a screen.

I don't ever write on the page.

I don't even think I know how to write longhand any more!

But I write something on the computer at the very last minute,

and lines and lines of it will probably be in my head before that.

I usually do it walking about.

I can't really sit down to do it because... errr...

I don't know. You need to be moving around.

Some parts of writing are to do deliberately trying not to write.

You might have to say, right, it's just going to have to wait.

Much as you don't want to.

Once I've written several poems in the same form,

I guess, then it becomes easier to write more.

And sometimes if you're lucky,

you can have a whole rake of poems together.

And then it stops, goes away, and leaves you forlorn. Again.

Since my mother stepped through the invisible looking glass

into fulltime mum-dom, each day,

some current frets

at her sense of self - but, yes! she thinks, there are birds!

Wheeling inland, all whoops and bright

hungry eyes in the noon light, over the estuary,

flying lighter than sparks.

We were saddened to hear about the passing of James Ellis,

born in Belfast in 1931,

he had a long stage and screen career

which saw him appear in everything from Boys From the Blackstuff

to Dr Who, and Only Fools and Horses.

He became a household name in the UK for his role in Z Cars,

which he played for 16 years,

but is most fondly remembered here for his seminal role

as Norman Martin in the Billy plays.

Well, she loved him! She despised you, but she loved him!