Poet Paula Meehan's latest work, The City of Our Dreaming, was specially commissioned by the Guinness Choir to mark the 75th anniversary of its founding.
Set to music by Seán Doherty, the work will receive its world premiere at St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin on Thursday 7th May, as part of the Culture Date with Dublin 8 Festival.
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We asked Paula for her choice cultural picks...
FILM
There's a whole month of April screenings at the IFI of the work of Alan Gilsenan. I’ll be catching as much as I can but I’m particularly looking forward to his new movie, Journey of Weather Exposed-Bones, a Japanese road trip mapped out of a remarkable book. The Complete Haiku of Matsuo Bashō, all 980 of them, is brilliantly translated by the Dublin poet, Andrew Fitzsimons. Bashō, The 17th Century wandering poet’s images are as fresh as the day they were minted. He is revered here. We’ve a Duais Bashō, the haiku competition for postprimary schools run by Poetry Ireland which is often where kids get their start in poetry, in Irish, in English or in both languages.
RADIO
Also remembering that poet Gabriel Rosenstock, our great haibun, who died in early April was a support to and champion of the Duais Bashō and sometimes judged it. His translations into Irish often imported wholesale into his mother tongue the treasured scripts of the wisdom traditions of India, of Asia, and beyond. As impressive a backlist as Bashō himself he authored hundreds of works. His conversations on the brink of death with his son Tristan were broadcast on Raidió na Gaeltachta the day his death was announced. A profoundly moving programme in its dignity, courage and humility.
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PODCAST
I am charmed and infuriated and educated in equal measure by Diarmuid Ferriter and Catriona Crowe, podcasting as What Were We Like? on RTE Radio. Both esteemed historians of rapier wit and laser vision, they fillet politicians and contextualise our bewilderment at the quirks and backtracks and byways and cul de sacs of our history. And plenty of it lived through by them both. Catriona, when in charge of special projects in the National Archives, put the 1901 and the 1911 census up on line thus enabling all us history addled to chase up our grannies. And make some extraordinary discoveries as we literally re-membered the streets and townlands of our revolutionary period and fell into the chasm between what we were told in family lore and what the cold print spelled out.
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ART
I’ll be rambling up the river Liffey to IMMA and I’ll swing through the Phoenix Park to catch the May flowerings whether in the neat municipal beds or in hedgerows & hares corners. It is always a moment when Dublin breaks into blossom. There is much to engage with at IMMA and I’ll nip in and out over the summer but one trip will be to see Camille Souter, whom I adored with Alberta Whittle in a show called Fisherwoman, Fisherwoman. I can’t wait, but I’ll have to, for the total immersion in what will be the RHA’s 196th Annual Exhibition in their beautiful gallery in Ely Place. It’s a fantastic show of what the members are making currently and it’s also Ireland’s largest open call exhibition of contemporary work. It’s where I go to be astonished. It also allows for a ramble in St Stephen’s Green or in Merrion Square, where I lived in shabby gentility in a Georgian house in that crazy boom decade running up to the millennium. Our new owner collected art but alas he didn’t collect artists and we were fecked out unceremoniously after a very happy and productive decade there. Just saying. Just banging on again about artists have nowhere to live let alone space to work in the city.
TECH
The Online Etymology Dictionary is always open on my desktop, especially when I am making poems, transferring the drafts to the screen, turning the scrawls in my notebooks into the texts on their dodgy journeys out into the world of print. It was set up originally by a maverick lexicographer with a passion for the history embedded in words. Pasternak said that each word carries its ghosts and for me, writing in an imperial language like English, which hoovered up languages as the Empire appropriated land, it is such a useful tool. I believe if I can get all the ghosts of all the words in a line in chorus then the line has a chance of being good. With etymonline you just enter your word and you get the history, the roots of it, the lore, in short the story of the word.
GIG
Sallins Inquiry Now! was a powerful night in Vicar Street on the 29th of March where artists, musicians, journalists took to the stage to call again for a public inquiry into the shameful miscarriage of justice 50 years ago when confessions were beaten out of four young men, actions that rippled out in waves of trauma for the men, their families and their friends. Hopefully this last push of a long campaign has been energised by the night, the voice of Christy Moore, the voice of Damo & his devoted choral army, of John Spillane parading his cherry trees, (well done everyone), of Kila knocking the roof off its moorings, of the ceol draoicht of Colm mac an Iomaire. I felt relieved of some of the shame I feel as an Irish citizen that 50 years later the brutality of the Heavy Gang has not been addressed.
The gig I am most looking forward to is happening in The National Stadium as part of the Culture Date with Dublin 8: In the Ring with Dan Donnelly and Dublin's Boxing Legends at the National Stadium Saturday 9th May at 8pm. Grab your tickets for a powerful in-ring cultural gathering exploring the life, legend and legacy of Ireland’s first heavyweight champion, Dan Donnelly. The press release says "Hosted by historian Donal Fallon, this unique evening blends conversation, music, spoken word and performance, bringing together leading voices from across Irish culture including Barry McGovern, Brian Kerr, Terry O’Neill, Kellie McLoughlin, Emmet O’Brien, Niamh Ní Charra and very special guest Damien Dempsey. Through story and song, the event traces how Donnelly’s victories became symbols of pride and resistance, and how his myth has echoed through generations." That’s all a big lure for me. A private lure is all the times as teenagers we bunked in to see the rock gods of our youth, having climbed over the back walls of the army barrack behind the stadium. My father, Larry, boxed there as a lad and my grandfather, Wattie Meehan, managed the legendary boxer Spike McCormack back in the 1940’s. I heard a rumour Dan Donnelly’s arm will feature in the night for sure more than a rumour will be Damo’s Army in full voice.
BOOKS
I’ve been binge reading the Collected Poems of Eavan Boland and reading Jane Hirshfield’s poems and writings on poetry, especially her writings on Bashō in preparation for a reading with Jane as part of the very first Eavan Boland Weekend. I’ve lived with Eavan’s work since I was a baby poet and it’s such a joy to hold in my hands her books, the transformative, powerful, heft of a major force in our tradition. Jane Hirshfield’s new book comes from Bloodaxe Books this side of the Atlantic. The Asking is a deep meditation of what the world asks of us as poets, as human beings, as citizens of Planet Earth in radical empathy with her creatures and her processes.
Also in my sight here on my desk is Áine Uí Fhoglú’s Scéal ó Carolina - News from Carolina – Noticias de Carolina, the trilingual publication of her poems from a new Irish language press, Éabhloid, It’s a beautifully made book about a journey to Buenos Aires that Áine made to meet her godparents, for the first time since her baptism. With a stellar line up of Irish poets carrying her over from her mother tongue into radiant English and Argentinian poet Jorge Fondebrider bringing them into Spanish. The poems are drenched in the light and intensity of the city where Colm Tóibín set his novel The Story of the Night. Which brings me by a commodius vicus of recirculation from News from Carolina to The News from Dublin, Colm’s new book that I’ve just cracked open on the title story — Augusta Gregory and the telegram announcing her only son Robert’s death in 1918.
The story drove me back to WB Yeats’s poem with their haunting lines, the young war dead very much in our hearts these strange times.
"Those that I fight I do not hate
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor"
I am also reading, for I am a simultaneous reader, on Kindle, Neil Jordan’s new heartbreaking and hilarious novel, The Library of Traumatic Memory, set in a part of the world I love, the Beara peninsula against the backdrop of the copper mines of Allihies. The mines were earliestly mined in the Bronze Age and, though the new Republic had a Plan and made a few scrapings, the last commercial flourish was essentially Victorian with the Cornish Puxley family. I’ve been reading Neil since his debut short story collection, Night in Tunisia and memory, reliable and unreliable alike is his forte. Doublings, symmetries, doppelgangers, versions, hauntings in architecture and in flesh fill his pages — Angela Carter meets de Selby meets James Stephens meets Bram Stoker meets Alice coming back through the mirror. Here he pushes the Gothic into the digital age, memory mining in the Huxley Institute a ghost of the Puxley Mansion just outside Castletownberehaven, where machine memory is mined in the data rush, a rush every bit as frantic as the goldrush.
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Also winking at me from my Kindle is the poet Mary O’Donnell’s Sweep The Cobwebs Off The Sky, a new novel published by époque press. If it is a patch on her recent short story collection, Walking Ghosts, I am in for a grand read — intense portraits of characters who are less misfits than misplaced, in many senses of the word.
THE NEXT BIG THING...
Armageddon aka the Apocalypse or the End of Days. The end is nigh; It’s always nigh. Especially if you live to be as old as I am.
The City of Our Dreaming will receive its world premiere at St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin on Thursday 7th May, as part of the Culture Date with Dublin 8 Festival - find out more here.
