Ireland 3

July 31, 2012

Went last evening to a café on Bridge Street to a program of Yeats’ plays for dancers, put on by John and Sandra from Blue Raincoat. John was a handsome, stocky man with a blond beard. Sandra had a hard face but a sensational figure, and both had that deep as-from-a-throat-of-bronze voice Irish actors can have, and which is necessary for epic theater such as Yeats’. I was not filled with confidence, as they were preparing before my eyes (I, as usual, having come early) but in the event they were wonderful. The readings from the plays were poetry, and both, especially Sandra, possessed a scholar’s knowledge and an actor’s fluidity of expression. The bridge and Castle Street were visible from the upper floors of the café, but what I was thinking was what a delight to be able to hear and hear about material that there is, literally, in my life no one else about which to confer. I was like a man returning from a far country, hearing his own language. Blue Raincoat had done the dance plays, so it was not theoretical. I gobbled it up gluttonously. Felt a shock of recognition, too, when they were prefacing Dreaming of the Bones, for Tiernan O’Rourke was king of Breffni, and Breffni was here, and my mother’s family the O’Keenans were the bards of the O’Rourkes, so when I first walked the Garavogue thirty two years ago, overcome with the sense of belonging, I was remembering and not imagining. It was my ancestor’s voice who first sung that story, the chief of Ireland’s sorrows. Wanted to ask John and Sandra about Peter Davey, but I was afraid the response might be a blank look and a shrug.

Strode thereafter to the Methodist church on Wine Street to hear two poets associated with the Yeats seminar, which cohabits with Tread Softly this year. They were personable, charming, serious in their efforts, not very good. Met one of them in Hagadorn’s later, and didn’t tell him that. I’ve observed before that there seem to me to be levels of poetry, and one can achieve excellence in the precise-observation-of-things-around-you mode, and yet not quite approach true greatness. There must be a theme. There must be a reaching beyond the experience of the individual. One of the poets actually brought this up, discussing the greatness of Virgil’s Georgics, observing that it was precisely observed, accurate, but did not stop with that.
After poetry I cruised for a likely bar, and chose Hagadorn’s, where I assumed (rightly) that the poets and their entourages would be gathering. A man named Rory Lambe sat beside me, already drunk. Rory incited a Yeats-reciting contest in the bar, which for a while included a goodly number of celebrants, all of whom knew a little something of the bard. I won the contest handily, but might not have had Rory not been so drunk. Bought a round and left the bar, coming back to the Glass House. I myself was pretty drunk by then, but I think I chatted with the bartenders, one of whom was Irish/Japanese and had grown up in Berlin and spoke fluently to the many German guests, the other a smiling dark-haired local boy. And so, unless there’s something I’ve forgotten, to bed.