Looking through a mound of old photographs the other day, I came across a few I thought I'd lost: a group of poets paused in the woods, for all the world like something out of Robert Frost, another of the American poet Carolyn Forche smiling in that attentive way she had at Miroslav Holub and one of Theo Dorgan, sitting at a table in the pre-renovation Atlanta, with the ink still drying on the vellum on which Holub had just inscribed a poem for the great Book of Ireland.
That was in 1990, before Galway got posh and poetry trendy. The Cuirt grant stood at about a thousand pounds and the programme ran for three days. What we couldn't provide in the way of fees, we tried to make up for in hospitality. The snaps had been taken on a trip with the poets for cream tea at Ballinahynch Castle. The idea was to show them the spectacular scenery en route. To this end, several of us piled into our ancient and ill-tempered Austin Allegro, while Carolyn Forche took Holub and several others in her fancy hired number.
Two miles out the road the mist came down, and from there on she followed our fog lights. Visibility was about six feet. It was as bad as Frank McCourt's Limerick childhood. Or my own. As it happens, Forche had always wanted to meet Holub and they were still talking animatedly about Czechoslovakia on the drive back.
We were always in need of all the advice and help we could get and when George MacBeth moved to Tuam, he was ready with both. During his years with the BBC he had met a great number of writers and knew everyone. He put up several poets in big house style and ferried them to the various events in his golden Jaguar, one window of which never quite closed. He and his wife Penny would throw great apresfestival parties. I met Carol Anne Duffy there, and watched Michael Donaghy teaching my daughter to play the bodhran. The house was so big that one visitor was heard to remark "I'm not going another step until I see a policeman."
Writers have been very generous to Cuirt, often reading for far lower fees than they could command elsewhere, and giving their time generously to organisers and audiences alike. When I met Derek Walcott at the Dublin Writer's Festival and invited him to read, he jokingly asked "Can you afford me?", to which I replied "Probably not," but he said he'd try and make it, and to ring him in Boston. Then he won the Nobel Prize. I rang him anyway and he came the following year when the festival was able to put him up in style, thanks to sponsorship and an increased grant. When we took him to eat at Nimmo's after the reading, a large party of diners stood up as we passed and applauded. If he was surprised, he didn't let on. Galway people have been generous to visiting writers, reading their books, attending their readings, showing interest in their work in the pub or the cafe afterwards. Working on Cuirt was exhausting and exhilarating and I loved it.
After eight years in Portugal, I was starved for poetry and could talk about it for days on end - and did. As did others: Lar Cassidy with one of his heroes, Tony Harrison, on the lookout for a pub with a graveyard out the back. Seamus Hosey, his ear always open for the new and the quirky. There are times now when I can think of no fate worse than incarceration in the festival club with poets, posers and honest audience, times when talk about poetry had been swapped for the deadly "literary conversation", but the atmosphere then was pure oxygen.
As it was again when Allen Ginsberg gathered the young men and women around him in Tigh Neachtain and held them spellbound as he did me, not because he was famous but because he was good. Apart from Howl and Kaddish, I had no great interest in Ginsberg and I am grateful that he changed my mind.
I hope Cuirt continues to throw such switches for new writers and for the audience - which means, first and foremost, local people, who should always feel welcome to attend and comment. That's what keeps poetry and prose in the mouths of the people, where they belong.