More than words on a page

AFTER the personal vitriol that marked the debate on the state of Irish poetry last year, the poets were given the back seat and this year the AT Cross/Cuirt Festival of Literature celebrated its tenth anniversary with a programme that favoured those who write in the longer form. The big names included Canadian Margaret Atwood, as well as the Irish novelists, Jennifer Johnston and Pat McCabe; but this year, the real star attraction was the invisible intellectual himself Irvine Welsh.

Welsh attracts the kind of unhealthy devotion normally reserved for rock icons like Morrissey. His rise to literary super stardom has been so meteoric that he claims he has had little time to reflect on it implications. Thankfully, none of this has affected his work and on Saturday night he read to a capacity crowd in Nun's Island Arts Centre from his forthcoming novel, Ecstasy; A Chemical Romance. Spell bound, we watched as he danced once more into the heart of psychedelic experience.

Displaying a masterful grasp of form and structure, Welsh's writing continues to mix terror and farce in equal measure. His words drip with such authenticity and sparkle, both on the page and in performance, with such astute rhythms that they have the power to induce the kind of collective experience that up to now has been illegal.

Even so the best performance of the week was that of Pat McCabe who has the kind of surreal comic touch worthy of Flann O'Brien. Yet, with a whisper, he can cut the atmosphere to the hone as he did for a chilling revisit to the cold, grey world of his masterpiece, The Butcher Boy. McCabe - like Welsh and Jennifer Johnston who read earlier in the week is a superb reader of his own work and all three provide convincing evidence for the view that literature can be so much more than words on a page.

Mind you the poets had something to say about that as well and on Thursday, American academic and poet Dana Gioia flew in to give a lecture on that very subject. Entitled Poetry Now: The Collapse of Print Culture, Gioia discussed the changing hierarchies of a culture that is moving away from the printed world towards some kind of multi cultural babel where folk culture (Rap music, to use his example) can achieve the same parity of esteem in the popular consciousness that at one time was the sole preserve of dead white Europeans. As if to under score the point, the biggest turn out for any of the poets reading this year was for the dub poet, Benjamin Zephaniah.

Zephaniah, who gave two performances, one for children and one for grown ups, is an oral poet steeped in Jamaican tradition. Self taught since leaving school at the age of twelve, he explained, in a lively question and answer session at the children's reading, that he composes most of the poems in his head and only writes them town when it comes time to publish them in book form. He also pointed out that some of the poems he was reading for them - had also gone down just as well with the adults the night before.

Besides that particular debate - on the state of print culture, Cuirt continued its policy of courting controversy. Paraic Breathnach got the ball rolling with his opening remarks at the festival launch about what he called the "Begrudger's guide to the Arts" that seemed to inform the city fathers' approach to the arts community in Galway. Of course, artists are the easiest people in the world to provoke and for all lovers of fiery debate the programming of three discussion forums held much promise.

In the main, the issue was that of translation. For the poets, it was the translation between Irish and English, for the theatre people, it was the performance of Irish theatre abroad, and for the film makers it was the translation of commerce into art. Unfortunately, there was none of the vitriol which can turn such occasions into an essential blood sport, for the public, but although things remained civil, there was plenty of fevered speculation.

Although now ten years old, Cuirt still maintains its spirit of informal intimacy combined with the utmost respect for the writer and, his or her work. Expertly organised, it remains, to quote, Pat McCabe, the best festival of literature in the country. And the best craic!"