THE HANDSTAND

JULY 2002

Quite a quiet weekend….The Writers Conference was quiet. Without adequate amplification some people failed to hear these icons of western civilisation disport their vowels or their consonants .Twice I managed to hear every word that two poets commanded – real poets who plunged the listener inside the “boiler house”(to give the Yeatsean flip to a phrase..)of their creative fire. Indeed perhaps I would have heard Charles Simic, the prolific Yugoslav poet, too, but he spoke in such low tones, from the very depth of his palate and I never heard a word. Seamus Heaney was ofcourse not present, but the programme note enabled him to describe Simic as a surrealist who manages to evade the surrealist penalty of weightlessness. Penalty? ( I shrug, I am in Heaney’s monkish realm)

Pat Boran gave every introduction his flavour of wit and irreverence, but the Nordic Voice, a gathering of five leading Scandanavian writers, did not rise to his suggestion that they would rear up with argument directly to reveal their disparate views in fine style. A fine style they did maintain, of friendly association and only one, the Finlander, Lauri Otonkoski, smouldered visibly with poetic rage when Pat too casually suggested that so much loss occurred to poems when they had to suffer translation. Further to which, Madame Iselin Hermann told us of comic difficulties she has with publishers – an Italian who wrote of: “the smell of his elbow she longed for..” ELBOW?! O, said the gentleman, I couldn’t mention “armpit”, you would lose all your readers…

One thing I really detested about a number of women readers from Fay Weldon on was the rich plummy voices adopted which because of the lack of careful amplification ( which we always got when this event was held in the National Concert Hall) became a monotonous moo-ing. Also I cannot imagine why women write so much about their mothers.

A film by Doris Dorrie, without subtitles or voice-over, provided a welcome break which you will understand when I tell you that two German men, who had crashed their marital lives with a personal reluctance to continue them, got lost in Tokio, and found in a Zen Buddhist monastry . Madame Dorrie could risk a confused or restless response to her film because the monks made her such a wonderful visual gift with their rituals and the beautiful and curious environment. She swore to us that her subjects took on a sea-change by submitting to Zen indoctrination, but at the end they merely seemed to revel even more substantially in their personal idiosyncracies.

Yu Hua appeared, nobody read any work of his but he answered some questions and accompanied his answers with amusing ganster body-language, his small hands flickering through the hot air accompanied by the flip flap of programmes, everyone needed to fan the air.

At personal risk to my sanity I gave up the strong lure of noisy overcrowded places to watch the World Cup Match at Sunday noon, to attend a reading in The New Theatre in Essex St. by Sujata Batt. She read from her collection "A Colour for Solitude". This truly beautiful volume full of a literary force and visual splendour is about two women artists in Germany in 1897.It traces their relationships and period of artistic achievement. Paula Modersohn-Becker, whose self-portraits were the inspiration for these poems,with her friend Clara Rilke Westhoff, knew Rilke and Rodin, two of the greatest artists, poet and sculptor respectively, of that period.. The two women were close but separate,confessional but solitary, each in difficult relation to the men in their lives, both breaking the mould of convention through which all future women artists emerged, until Paula's early death after the birth of her child. Sujata Batt writes poetry which contains the extraordinary impulse of these portraits and letters that she researched, which obviously became for her a similar depth of impulse that haunts these verses. Clouds...they start racing/ as if they were fleeing, anxious/ to get away/ from something terrible-/ anxious to follow the birds/ into the future.....The light is harsh/the shadows are grim/But can truth be partly remembered?/its texture felt beforehand/like an old dream half-forgotten in our minds/Or must it always surprise? ...Truth does not belong/ to you alone - Truth does not / belong to anyone. Maybe this portrait/that I am making of you/ is more intimate than sex.

As a result of receiving from this fine poet such a gift to feed the frightful hunger I feel for these deep shadows where colour and light, surface and subtle complexity are revealed by these companions to men in their artistic milleu; a hunger that is suffered here in Dublin, just as James Joyce in his own time depicted; (indeed this all took place on the 16th June)I read and re-read these poems to console and to feel that thrill of my youth when I found Rilke's poems whom none appreciated here.

Jamie O'Neill gabbled off some pages of his book without respect of any kind for the words he is reputed to have taken ten years to write.But then why would he bother?At the final Gala Night the man they love to hate in France, Michel Houellebecq, crouched on a small chair beside his translator who sat on a large one. I expected himself to leap up and attack the foundations of our conventional audience with marvellous obscenities and expose his reputed racial affections to which the audience would respond with jeers of rage and we would all enjoy ourselves. But nothing happened, and of what the two men read, I have no knowledge. I asked all assembled in the toilets afterwards if someone could enlighten me but no one had heard a thing.As I laughed with some young ones in the foyer later, Mr. Banville came through a door to hear :"What an amazing amount of boredom we all submit to!"

The festivals some years ago were more interesting in that the writers were asked to discuss their ideas on stage, as well as read excerpts of work investing those ideas. The audience also took part in questioning and sometimes developing their own ideas. There was much more of a sense of community and communication between writer and reader - however Messrs Banville and Cronin did not enjoy hearing the public voice or seeing famous men mix drinks in the bar with vagabonds like myself, and vowed to discontinue such liberties. I well remember Miroslav Holub reading a poem to amuse us,A Conversation with a Poet:
The quality of a poem is for once only and depends not on you but on circumstances.
"I believe that circumtances will be the same too..."
If you believe that then you won't be a poet and never were a poet.