Limerick 1

October 15, 2008

Patrick Punch’s Hotel, Limerick, more elegant and more remote from the center of things than I expected. We’ll see in a minute what they mean by saying the town center is "just a wee stroll away."

The Imperial charged me 100 euros for MA to stay. I should have made him eat breakfast.

Afternoon: The "wee stroll" is doable. I’m not far from the lovely park and the Limerick Art Museum, one of the world’s sweetest, and I veered off the main street to go there first. There was a book launch of a book of poems by one Marian O’Rourke. I stayed for the opening speeches (inexpressibly embarrassing, a filigree of Celtic rhetoric applied to nothing) and for the reading. The poems were not good, but missed being bad by reason of O’Rourke’s old lady modesty. The poems were doilies. One about a fox was nice. Had conversation with women who are part of the poetry festival, Cuisle, which begins tonight at the White House. I am "new meat" and I was rather popular at the reading. I gave the women a copy of A Dream of Adonis and postcards from Anna Livia, Lucky in Her Bridges. I strolled on to the Belltable Arts Center to eat soup and learn as much as I could about the poetry festival. I seem to have arrived at its outset. I will go. It will keep me out of the bars around the railway station where I looked forward to a different kind of adventure. By the time I came out of the reading, it was raining, and I had eaten a sandwich, so I was sick. But still I walked down to the road that leads to Irishtown, looking for the Central Bar, to give them a copy of Adonis, where the poem about the Central Bar and the god who once ate there appears. It is gone. Maybe I could find the god on the street if I looked hard enough.

Part of the flood of information that came out of horse-Kevin’s mouth at the Roisin Dubh was the fact that Guinness is now owned by a French conglomerate, Daigeo. I had wanted to buy Guinness stock, but couldn’t find the listing. Kevin showed me the way, and so I bought, and am gleeful now each time someone orders a pint in my hearing. I was disappointed with the location of Patrick Punch, but it situated me so as to learn of the poetry festival, and make myself known already this time through in a little way.

I wish I had given myself more time in Limerick. I feel a lightness here that I do not feel in Galway, less heroic, less heavy with the burden of the time to come.

Evening. Have become friends with Marian O’Rourke and her crowd of exceptional mature ladies. We found each other again at the opening readings at the Red Cross auditorium. Whatever my expectations, Sasha Dugdale and Pat Cotter gave fine and fascinating readings. I do love poetry, and wonder constantly why not everyone does. Even the effort to listen to Cotter and Dugdale in the bad hall and get every word was a kind of sensual pleasure. The quick answer to my question is that people are too lazy and too used to quick gratification to pay the requisite attention. But is that the correct answer? And if it is, is the strategy to browbeat people into attentiveness, or to make a kind of poetry which leading edge, at least, is so immediately enticing they approach of their own volition? I could not imagine why what I was hearing would not seem to everyone more fascinating than a video game or a rap song. It was harder, of course, and relied on something more than automatic reflex, but is that not part of its appeal? I must do something–something in addition to what I’ve been doing all my life–to achieve the renewal of poetry, else a great prince in prison lies.

I compared the festival to what happens in Asheville. It was not a happy comparison. The poet-lovers of Limerick are forty years older than those of Asheville. And fewer. And the poetry is better.

A chandelier fell in the White House. It lay in disgrace on the bathroom floor.