Artscape: The Canadians are coming - and they are bringing one of the biggest poetry prizes in the world with them.
As part of the Dublin Writers Festival in June, the €80,000 Griffin Poetry Prize will land in the city with this year's two winners and its organisers, including the man whose generosity is responsible for it all. Toronto-based philanthropist and industrialist Scott Griffin, chairman of the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry will be accompanied by "the Griffin team", which includes poets Carolyn Forché, Scott Griffin, Robin Robertson, David Young, Leslie Greentree, David Kirby and Gerald Stern .
The plan is for the visitors to join with Irish poets in an afternoon seminar - on June 16th - and give a reading that evening. The whole idea is to bring awareness of this valuable prize to a wider audience - in fact, there are two prizes, one for a Canadian poet and one for an international poet.
This year's international shortlist includes Charles Simic for his Selected Poems and Michael Symmons Roberts for Corpus, which won the Whitbread Poetry Prize last year. The prize was launched in September 2000 and its trustees, who include Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje, appoint the judges each year.
Meanwhile, the festival itself, programmed by broadcaster and poet Pat Boran, kicks off in the Project Arts Centre at lunchtime on June 16th with a reading involving two of the finest contemporary women poets, Kathleen Jamie and Carol Rumens (who, of course, is no stranger here, having occupied residencies in Cork and Belfast).
Other highlights during fours days' of readings include one by Slovenian poet Tomaz Salamun, who also happens to be a judge for this year's Griffin Prize. Salamun, whose work has been called "one of Europe's great philosophical wonders", is the author of 25 volumes of poetry and has been translated into 12 languages. He reads with poet, translator and Poetry Review editor Fiona Sampson.
This year's closing event - on Sunday, June 19th in the Gate Theatre - is a celebration of fiction writing, with Irish novelist and short-story writer Eugene McCabe reading alongside British writer Hilary Mantel (whose latest novel, Beyond Black, tells the story of John March, the absent father in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women) and Tobias Hill, who was one of the Times Literary Supplement's nominees for best young writers in Britain.
Feeding the biters
There's a long-held view that biting the hand that feeds you is not to be recommended. But what about biting it when the feeding has stopped, even if you were the cause of the stoppage yourself? Well, that's basically what the Contemporary Music Centre (CMC) in Dublin did last year after it lost its funding from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI), writes Michael Dervan.
CMC didn't get any funding, because it simply failed to apply for any. The failure seemed all the more remarkable as the centre had been campaigning for an increase on a £20,000 (€29,355) grant it regarded as "inadequate" for the level of service it was supplying.
CMC called on composers to lobby ACNI, threatened to withdraw services from Northern Irish composers, and engaged in direct lobbying of the Belfast cultural mandarins. ACNI, for its part, and with the support of a majority of composers in the North, decided to proceed with the establishment of Belfast-based archive and information services on Northern Irish music, the development of which appears to have been experienced as a threat by CMC.
Last week, CMC (which never carried out its threatened withdrawal of service) announced that it was "very pleased to report a successful outcome to two funding applications to support its work in Northern Ireland". It has been awarded a £40,000 (€58,710) grant, to cover a two-year period, under ACNI's National Lottery Multi-Annual Funding Programme, and a further grant of £4,900 (€7,190) towards the centre's next promotional CD of Irish music. The CMC's main funder remains the Arts Council in Dublin, which awarded a grant of €350,000 for 2005.
ACNI, for its part, had always held that, without prejudice, CMC was eligible to apply for funding again. So what do we have now? Are the grant awards the outcome of a hard-nosed campaign by CMC? Or is the situation closer to the old joke about the man who annoys fellow passengers by throwing tiny bits of paper out of the window of a bus to keep the elephants away, and who, when someone points out that there aren't any elephants, exclaims triumphantly, "I know. It works!"? On the one hand, if ACNI had been planning, as CMC suspected, to cut off funding, it has backed away from such a position. And if CMC had been hoping to increase its grant, it, too, has softened its line.
The scheme under which it has been funded is one with a ceiling of £20,000 per annum. CMC seems to have accepted the reality that its claim for an increase is not going to be met, at least in the short term.
Kindred spirits
Serendipity in south Connemara: Robert Quinn has been awarded the Spirit of the Festival Award at this year's Celtic Film Festival exactly 25 years after his dad, Bob, won the same prize, writes Lorna Siggins.
Quinn Óg was conferred with the award in Cardiff, Wales, for the drama documentary, Cinegael Paradiso, which he directed. The documentary, which also won the best feature award at last year's Galway Film Fleadh, draws on archival material, including home-made films, in a personal record of growing up as the son of the angry young broadcaster who quit RTÉ, moved west, established Cinegael in south Connemara - and made such pioneering films as Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoire and Poitín. Precisely a quarter of a century ago, Bob Quinn's Last Days of the Gaeltacht won the same award.
"He mustn't have scraped it off the rocks," the da, clearly delighted, commented this week. The writing, photographing, film-making, lateral- thinking father of six recently published The Atlantean Irish (Lilliput), which develops his original Atlantean film- and-book project of the early 1980s - with the benefit of 20 years' further research.
A community a little further west, on the Aran island of Inis Oírr, is hosting a debate next month on the nature of artistic talent. Cé as an ealaín is the title of the discussion, which will consider whether the artist is "born or made" - a genius or a resourceful person who can draw water from an artistic "well".
Participants in the event, which takes place at Áras Éanna, Inis Oírr's arts centre, from May 20th to 22nd, will be dancer Ríonach Ní Néill, writer Seán Mac Mathúna, musician John Spillane, visual artist Clíodna Cussen, poet Pádraig Mac Fhearghusa, cartoonist Flann Ó Riain and visual artist Áine Ní Chíobháin. More information is available from Val Balance at Áras Éanna, tel: 099-75150; e-mail: valballance@eircom.net.
Necessary celebration
As Belfast's Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival clicks into its sixth year, director Sean Kelly has clearly not lost his sure touch when it comes to tuning into current issues and political climates, writes Jane Coyle.
It's been a challenging year for Kelly and his small team, beginning on the eve of the 2004 festival, when their offices were destroyed in a blaze in the historic North Street Arcade. Then came what he calls "the current political stasis and growing tide of race hate that has seen Belfast dubbed 'the most racist city in the world' ".
So what would he consider to be an appropriate response? "We thought we'd just keep on doing what we do - put on the most culturally diverse and celebratory festival we could find. Sometimes putting on an arts festival can feel like a frivolous thing to do and sometimes it feels absolutely necessary. This is such a year."
That cultural diversity finds expression through artists from Ireland, England, Scotland, Japan, Turkey, the US, Canada, Cuba, China, Zimbabwe, Jamaica, Finland, Germany, Australia and France. And in spite of proposals for a flexible performance space being rejected by Belfast City Council and plans for a purpose-built arts venue in the Cathedral Quarter being still "under consideration", Kelly and co have managed to fit an incredible amount of business into a highly imaginative set of venues.
In the comedy programme, mainstream names such as Jack Dee and Ardal O'Hanlon mingle with Muslim comedian Shazia Mirza. Playwright Owen McCafferty is at last given a world premiere on home territory by Prime Cut, when he directs Patrick O'Kane in the dark, edgy Cold Comfort at the Old Museum Arts Centre, and literary figures such as Pat McCabe and JP Donleavy will give readings.
The festival runs from April 28th to May 8th. Programme and bookings at www.cqaf.com or the Belfast Welcome Centre, tel: 028-90246609.