Poets
Interview with John Hartley Williams
Listowel Writers’ Week is a unique literary festival, hosting stellar authors yet retaining an utterly down to earth, non-VIP charm. Smaller, more intimate festivals such as this often offer opportunities to rub shoulders with a long admired author. They can also be great places to accidentally stumble across someone new, as I did this year in the Listowel Arms; meeting poet and teacher John Hartley Williams who was at his first Listowel festival to give a poetry workshop.
Writing is a curious business, and the teaching of writing a stranger one still. The industry of creative writing is booming and yet the idea that writers are “born not made” is one that still dominates. John Hartley Williams is something of a contradiction on this subject. With twelve published collections of poetry under his belt and two nominations for the TS Eliot prize (most recently for the collection Blues, published by Jonathan Cape in 2004), he has also taught more creative writing classes than “he likes to remember” and has co-authored a book called Teach Yourself Writing Poetry with Irish poet Matthew Sweeney.
Flying High: Kate Dempsey meets Pat Boran
Pat Boran is a poet, fiction writer, publisher and radio broadcaster, as well as the editor of the highly respected Dedalus Press. Here he chats to Kate Dempsey.
Pat has been well known in the poetry world for many years now and has published four collections of poetry: The Unwound Clock (1990), which won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award, Familiar Things (1993), The Shape of Water (1996) and As the Hand, the Glove (2001). His New and Selected Poems was first published by Salt Publishing, UK, in 2005 and reissued by Dedalus in 2007. In 2007 Pat Boran was elected to the membership of Aosdána. In 2008 he received the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry in St. Paul, MN, USA.
Beautiful Words: Nuala Ni Chonchuir
Nuala Ní Chonchúir is a full-time fiction writer and poet. She has published three collections of short fiction, the most recent being Nude by Salt Publishing and three poetry collections, including the bi-lingual Tattoo: Tatu by Arlen House, and most recently one novel, You published by New Island.
Welcome to writing.ie. Could you introduce yourself to the readers please?
I’m a full-time writer from Dublin living in County Galway. I write both fiction and poetry but my heart lies in fiction really. I have three kids and ten hours a week to write so I stuff a lot into those precious ten hours. At the moment I am writing a novel and am at the ‘enjoying it’ stage of that.
How did you get into writing?
The Best of the Spoken Word
Hello Stephen, welcome to writing.ie. Could you introduce yourself to the readers please?
Poetry In Ireland
The earliest surviving poems in Ireland can be traced back as far as the 6th century AD. Undoubtedly the poetic tradition predates these as a strong oral tradition that continues to the present day. Early Irish poets trained for 12 years by which time they were second in status only to the King. They were required to record the royal genealogy and history in verse as well as composing curses and satires of political enemies. Another tradition that continues!
With the settlement of English planters in the late 17th century, Irish poetry changed dramatically. Poets lost their high, professional status and were hired to write poems in English for the landed settlers. Traditional Irish speaking poets continued to write, lamenting the loss of Irish culture and heritage.
The 18th century saw the emergence of one of Ireland’s best known writers, Jonathan Swift (1667–1745). Swift was a novelist and poet writing in English and Irish, signalling the start of an era where serious Irish poets expressed the Irish tradition through English.
The Celtic revival in the late 19th century and early 20th century produced some of Ireland’s most famous poets. The work of Oscar Wilde and W.B Yeats influenced many poets in the years that followed and Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923.
While Yeats and his contemporaries wrote about an aristocratic Gaelic Ireland, Post Civil War Ireland produced some outstanding modern poets with roots perhaps more representative of the nation of small farmers and shopkeepers. Names such as Patrick Kavanagh, Austin Clarke and Thomas Kinsella will be familiar to those raised on poetry from the Leaving Cert textbook ‘Soundings’ but the 20th century also introduced among others, John Montague, Eavan Boland and Louis McNeice as well as Seamus Heaney, Ireland’s second Nobel prize winner.
There are modernists and post-modernists, outsiders and traditionalists, the Northern movement, poets writing in English and Irish and in the final decades of the twentieth century, not before time, many women poets have emerged and flourished in the vibrant Irish poetry scene.
And today sees another renaissance and a travelled and travelling generation, looking out of Ireland as well as inwards. More poetry is published than ever before, magazines and anthologies break new ground, online communities thrive and hundreds of people turn out to innovative festivals and spoken word events up and down the country.
(c) Aoife Moore. Edited by Kate Dempsey
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