LIKE WARS and love affairs, it began over a cup of coffee. In the back office of a tiny disused church on Nuns Island, Galway, I was being funded on what was then called an SES – Social Employment Scheme – to be the Literature Officer in the embryonic Galway Arts Centre, a post I had more or less suggested for myself. Already the centre, whose administrator was Dick Donoghue, had managed to organise some literary events.
In my Rahoon flat I was reading Daniel Corkery's The Hidden Irelandand dipping in to Robert Graves's The White Goddess. I was confirmed in my belief that poetry was both socially relevant and sacred; that it had always found a special place to celebrate itself, even when the golden age of sponsored Gaelic poetry in Ireland died away with the Flight of the Earls. "Courts" of poetry had spread throughout Munster. Poets redefined their craft to suit a secular audience. And poetry was, in intention, form and origin, very different from prose. It originated in song and dance, in music, in our heart's rhythm. It would, I concluded, be a fine thing to establish again a sacred space for the celebration of poetry. A place where poetry might sing again to big audiences and, in doing so, reaffirm itself as a kind of sacred, public literature.
I proposed the initiating of a poetry festival, something devoted exclusively to the act of poetry, and that festival would happen in Galway, where poets in Irish and in English had found in their time and in their separate ways a centring place.
High ideas, perhaps; but it was wrong, in my view, that poetry shoud continue to constitute a kind of cultural hidden Ireland.
Not unnaturally, there were those who posited the view that going to a reading was one thing, but no one would last the pace of an entire festival devoted to poetry. However, this was still a time when the amateur was permitted in Irish art, and the idea was given its head.
Sponsors were sought, articles reached out through local newspapers. The festival would be given an Irish-language title which would recall its intent: Cúirt Fhilíochta Idirnáisiúnta na Gaillimhe. It would be a calling-out to poets throughout the country and the world. The very first poster was designed by Tom Taheny, a Galway artist, and featured a simpering “muse” and a great number of clippings from newspapers.
The first Cúirt festival came into the world on water. An ageing Aran Islands ferry at Galway Dock was the venue. The very first festival patron was Alderman Bridie O’Flaherty, Mayor of Galway. A photograph taken below decks on the ferry shows poet Gerald Dawe, Rita Ann Higgins, Eva Bourke and the late Iain Crichton Smith. I am there too, Chatterton-thin. Much organising, phoning and letter-writing – what did we do in those distant days before the internet? – created a varied and exciting programme featuring Galway poets such as John Hogan, Rita Ann Higgins, Kathleen O’Driscoll; then Eva Bourke, Eavan Boland, Thomas McCarthy, Iain Crichton Smith, Pat Ingoldsby, the late and great Sorley MacLean, Douglas Dunne, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, a children’s poetry competition and a “poetry forum”. The festival was truly a pan-city event; readings took place in venues as far apart as the Warwick Hotel in Salthill and the Imperial Hotel, Eyre Square, which had once hosted the great Antonin Artaud. Attendances were enthusiastic and fulsome.
Headlining the bill was a final night reading in what was then the Great Southern Hotel (now the Meyrick Hotel) by John Cooper Clarke and Paul Durcan. I waited in the Imperial Hotel while he got ready; he was accompanied by a friend who held up his bridal train of white material as we strolled across Eyre Square towards the hotel. A sleepy Galway stopped and stared.
A reading was one thing, but this event was to prove to be something else. Five hundred people jostled into the huge ballroom. Standing with the poets just behind the stage, it was easy to feel nervous in front of what was surely that biggest audience ever to attend a poetry reading in this country. Paul Durcan went on first and was marvellous, grabbing the audience easily; John Cooper Clarke approached up the aisle, his bridal train held off the carpet. The place erupted.
This was poetry taken to another level. Cooper Clarke had music behind him, tapes on a small player. No one had heard anything like this. The mix of Durcan and Cooper Clarke had thrown poetry wide into the audience, a challenge and a song, a fist of music. And the festival had proved its worth. Poetry had a modern, living audience outside the comfortable confines of academe and polite back-room gatherings. Poetry had found its “cúirt” once again.
The festival has grown, as such things do, and has moved away from its roots in poetry as a consequence. Film, music and prose have been given a seat. Paradoxically, while becoming bigger in terms of events, it has become geographically smaller in reach: events no longer take place in an assortment of locations around the city, but for the greater part are centralised in the Town Hall Theatre. It is not my place to say how the festival should or could develop. On a purely personal level, I miss its original intent, its fundamental rooting in poetry, and I would like to see a festival which roamed all over the city again.
But 25 years ago was a different time for the arts in Ireland. It would be nice to say my founding of the Cúirt festival had a personal happy ending but it didn’t, and that’s a tale for another day. Suffice it to say that the hour of the cultural amateur died in the mid-1980s, to be replaced by be-suited organisation and an umbrella of Arts Council control. Suddenly there was no room for crazy blokes with notions about poetry festivals. And the cost of the first Cúirt festival wouldn’t buy a set of good lunches these days. The organisers and others at Galway Arts Centre, who produce the festival, doubtless work hard to achieve what they do. Gone are the days thankfully, when, on hearing of a proposal to invite a prominent European poet to Cúirt, someone remarked that there was no point as not enough people in Galway spoke his language. There is literary variety, there is debate. But there are no more launches in the bellies of boats.
Fred Johnston is founder/ director of the Western Writers’ Centre, Galway (Ionad Scríbhneoirí Chaitlín Maude) Galway. Cúirt 25 – Féile Idirnáisiúnta Litríochta – runs from April 20th to 25th. He reads on April 25th at 5pm in Galway Town Hall Theatre. Others taking part are Mary O’Malley, Eva Bourke, Moya Cannon and Rita Ann Higgins. Admission €10.50 and €8.50 Festival details: 091 565886