Putting energy back into poetry

Young and old alike flock to the DLR Poetry Now Festival to provide an emphatic answer to the question: 'Who reads poetry anyway?'

'IT'S QUITE A demure festival," says Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney of the DLR Poetry Now International Poetry Festival, which took place last week in Dun Laoghaire's Pavilion Theatre. In the early afternoons, as a predominantly silver-topped audience filed in for debates and presentations on things poetic, the festival, now in its 13th year, may have appeared to earn such an adjective.

But as each day darkened over this four-day event, the demographic shifted as all ages filed in for reverent and irreverent readings that poured new energy into the form, an energy manifest in the thrown elbows around the book-selling stall after each event, in the rippling, centipedal queues for signings, and which spilled into the streets and all the way up to the bar of the Royal Marine Hotel.

By the time London poet Daljit Nagra announces he has christened his tipple of choice a "Heaney-ken" for the weekend that's in it, it's clear the demure has left the building and the poetry party is underway. Watching Nagra raise a glass to Heaney pulls metaphor right off the page and into this physical happening, an illustration perhaps of what has made this festival a standout in the crowded Irish calendar of the arts. There's a palpable vibrancy about this year, proof, perhaps, of what poet Maurice Scully articulated in the panel discussion held on Friday afternoon, entitled The Quarrel With Ourselves - Who Reads Poetry Anyway?

"Poetic impulse is hardwired into the human DNA," he told fellow poets, critics and editors around the cornered table as the panel took on the question of audience. "One of the great things about poetry is that it cannot be absorbed by market forces."

Yet Peter Fallon, publisher, countered that at the Gallery Press, they are "selling more books now than at the height of the Celtic Tiger." So who is buying them? The answers were elusive, but the questions touched on new technologies, the role of reviewers and the "difficulties" associated with reading poetry, with Fallon concluding, after all that "things are healthy, things are good" in poetry these days.

THE DEBATE CAME as one of a number of counterpoints to the evening readings, with the entire event, ably curated by Belinda McKeon in her first year at the helm, kicking off with a keynote address from poet and critic Ruth Padel on the movement and physicality of a poem. The readings that followed revealed how the physicality of the poems is often best revealed through the physical presence of the poets who crafted them, many of whom managed through their readings to make their work leap from the page into the ears of a rapt audience.

"It is a pleasure to hear language in a place that has been carefully crafted to hear language," said poet and visual artist Alice Lyons as she introduced a reading by Belfast's Alan Gillis, New York's Meghan O'Rourke and Nagra, who was born in London of Indian parents. These three distinct voices, coming from a common, urban root but varied in approach and accent, illustrated the broad scope of this year's festival, in which Jamaica rubbed shoulders with Italy, Arkansas approached Armagh, and the registers of Cork, California, Belfast and Budapest were all detected in their individual music, vibrating long after the readings concluded.

It was testimony to McKeon's search for "a certain chemistry between voices", as she called it, the motivation also behind the unusual pairing of Arkansas poet CD Wright with Derry-born Heaney, which was one of the highlights of the festival.

If the voices were varied, so too were the themes they explored, with Brian Turner's harrowing poetry of war playing out alongside the intimate and private griefs of Meghan O'Rourke's Halflife, the exile's dislocation in Kei Miller's In This New Countryseries or the crocodiles and obelisks of Jamie McKendrick.

There were sombre moments, as when Turner read 2000lbs, a poem about a suicide bomb at a market square to a hushed and horrified audience, and others of poignancy, as in Bernard O'Donoghue's reading of his poem Ter Conatus, which explores the relationship between a rural sister and brother who avoid physical contact until it is made impossible by death. Yet many of the poets present allowed space for humour too.

"When I first started trying to get published, it was really easy," Nagra said with glee as he began his own reading. "I bet you wish you were Indians!" Humour was there in Alan Gillis's five-minute-long listing of alternate names for his own genitalia, Bernard O'Donoghue's anecdote about flying to Manchester in 1953 to watch the coronation on television, or Heaney's evoking of Flann O'Brien in his description of a patient "blowing the foam off his medicine". It's a festival of poetry, and the poets were rightfully centre stage, face-to-face with an audience as they emerged from what is often a solitary endeavour. "Poetry is essentially inwardly-directed activity," admits Harry Clifton, winner of The Irish TimesPoetry Now Award, presented to him during the fesitval. "Everybody needs some external endorsement for what they've done."

England-born, Clonakilty-reared Dave Lordan was the recipient of a special endorsement when he took home the Strong Award for Best First Collection for The Boy In The Ring.Yet for Nagra, the importance of a festival like DLR Poetry Now lay in bringing poets into contact with each other as well as with readers. "Festivals are very good at enabling poets to meet each other and getting you sitting down and talking," he said.

For McKeon, this has been one of the delights of curating such an event. "You're putting people together who've never met - they're coming from very different places, both geographically and as artists, and seeing them become a community has been very pleasurable for me."

IT'S A TRIBUTE to McKeon to witness the community of poets that comes together over the course of the weekend, but the festival is also for readers, the audiences that attend the daily events, purchase the books, take home the words and linger with them long after the poets are gone. They are Margaret Hughes and Valerie Sheridan, who emerge beaming into the Dun Laoghaire evening from the final reading, ready to purchase tickets for 2009.

They are poet Keith Payne, who says questions of what the poem can accomplish were answered for him at the reading in support of International Pen, where McCarthy read a poem by Afghan poet Abdul Sami Hamed. "Like the perfume through the bars of Hamed's piece, this weekend's poems floated out and struck each and every one in their seats," he says .

So what of Peter Sirr's contention during the panel debate that "poetry exists largely in the white space of a page and must be encountered in silence too?" As Hungarian-born poet George Szirtes remarked before his own reading: "Poetry is an intimate art, it's not a mass art." Which still allows for readings, for festivals, as long as we bear in mind: "Everybody who listens, listens as one."

ROETHKE IS REMEMBERED:

"Poetry is an act of mischief," Philip Coleman, of Trinity College's School of English, quoted from poet Theodore Roethke in his introduction to A Centenary Remembrance of Theodore Roethke, by Dennis O'Driscoll and Thomas McCarthy.

With Richard Murphy originally slated to lead the presentation on the Pulitzer prize-winning American poet, but unable to attend at the last minute, poet Dennis O'Driscoll stepped with considerable aplomb into the breach as a self-styled "locum".

In an entertaining presentation, O'Driscoll reminded the audience of Roethke's rules for poetry, and then demonstrated how, at his best, he flouted them.

"When he wasn't observing any rules, he was an extraordinary, exquisite poet," said O'Driscoll.

He described Roethke's visit to Ireland and spiralling into mania, with his lively reading from Murphy's memoir, The Kick, dragging Roethke's mighty frame roaring into the room.

O'Driscoll was followed by poet Thomas McCarthy, whose placing of Roethke within the social and cultural context of Middle America served to emphasise the unique nature of his poetic voice. In a tribute to the poet's constructive genius, he highlighted the architectural process through which Roethke constructed his poems. "It is as a maker that Roethke could best be remembered," said McCarthy.

Yet despite the legacy of this master of the lyric poem, McCarthy reminded his audience of the frailty within a man who suffered all his life from bi-polar disorder, ending his nuanced presentation with a haunting repetition.

"The recurring word in his diaries and the recurring word in his life is merely this one: frightened, frightened, frightened."