the magazine had achieved a lot since its inaugural issue in August 2014.
Founded by two journalism students, Aravind Jayan and Kaartikeya Bajpai, this magazine not only helps writers find an outlet for their work, but its fanbase of 1,200 readers on their Facebook page gifts writers readers as well. And that is worth its weight in words as at some level the subject of any story or poem is always the reader. The process of one writer leading to and influencing another is one which this magazine has ensured, as it has moved beyond national boundaries and religious divides, beginning with a small literary
event at a neighbourhood cafe to doing cross border collaborations to International Events, of which Letterkenny was honoured to have been a part of on Thursday night in partnership with Cafe Blend and North West Words. Without the hospitality and support of Cafe Blend and the generous vision of North West Words the event would not have been as easy to facilitate. The Ireland Edition of this five city tour would not have occurred without the participation and contributions of all the participating writers in Saudi,
India, the UK, India and Ireland, specifically Letterkenny.
The common place of origin in all of us, to which Imagination is the only native, is Art.
It can never be curtailed by borders, politicians playing marbles in the playgrounds of opinions, or by the smog of Hatred's chimneys. Good writing allows us to widen our eyes again, to see each other afresh using new symbols and metaphors, to begin to forge a language free from slogan and spit, a language that is as inclusive as the sky's range and as ever present as the face of the moon.
The stories and poems that were read forged new alphabets of communication between listener and writer.
These meetings that took place between words, readers and listeners remind us of Yannis Ritsos's lines -
Every word is a doorway
to a meeting, one often cancelled,and that's when a word is true, when it insists on the
meeting. The Meaning of Simplicity.
The first half of the evening treated the audience to poems written as part of a Poetic
Challenge. The group of three named themselves "Poetically Challenged" , and are
made up of Ineke Abbas, Donal Kavanagh and Kieran Devlin. I particularly enjoyed
their response to the prompt 'Muesli', as did the audience, especially when they took
out their ukeleles. Their particular strength lies in the tongue-in-cheek delivery and
response to what have become entrenched as authentic poetic themes. Each poet
in the group handles line differently, however, which prevents them from sinking into
uniformity. Patricia Morris is a singer, songwriter and poet. Her voice is as haunting
as the selkies so prevalent in the folklore of her native Scotland. And as sonorous.
Many of her poems contained maritime imagery and I look forward to reading them
in book form.
After a brief interval, the second half of the evening belonged to the writers, who
performed their poems and pieces of short fiction to the appreciative audience.I
had asked each performer to give me a hard copy of their work at the start of
the evening. Two pieces were to be chosen by me for publication in "The Bombay
Review." All in all there were fifteen poems and two pieces of fiction.
Pat O'Doherty's piece, entitled "Humble Man" and written in the third person was
a beautifully heartfelt piece of memoir. It reminded me of those early pieces in
Dermot Healy's Force 10. Written as spoken, it had the quality of verisimilitude
that Healy so admired. Caroline Mohan's piece, entitled "One for Sorrow" had
a quality reminiscent of a Kelly Link story. Chekhov's argument that if a pistol is
introduced at the beginning of a story, it must be fired by the end of the story is
skillfully played with here. Nothing is quite as it seems, nor should it be seen to be
in Mohan's skilful hands, and this was the piece I chose.
Sorrel Mae Florence's poem "Celtic Cross Falling" offered a different take on the
symbol of the Celtic Cross, tying it to soul memory, rejecting the norms of social
acceptance and giving Biddy Early a mention. While there were beautiful lines,
my favourites being "I will feel the pulse of music/and the magpie's lonely call"
the poem's length, 52 lines in all, made it harder for the metaphor of the cross to
be consistently functional rather than decorative.In complete contrast, Andrew
Galvin's 'My Father is a sweetheart anarchist" offered a surrealist take on the
poetic trope of the father. I liked the wordplay with 'in the Father, the son and
the holey vest' but the interconnections the surrealists so loved by placing distant
realities together only apparent to the creator was shunned in favour of a narrative
that although moving would have worked better if the poem had finished a little
earlier and didn't try to encompass as much. One to watch. A gentle lyric that
recorded a moment of despair at her powerlessness over the outcome of her
husband's accident impressed. Poems that recall an event are difficult to carry
off, but Taryn Gleeson managed it in "Untitled." Nick Griffiths has an anarchic
humour that never fails to engage an audience, and his poem "Mixed Marriage"
didn't fail to amuse. In a poem that uses free verse the effect of surprise is one
that allows the writer to play with tension, and if we guess at the intent earlier
than the poet intends, the poem can lose some of its strength. I would have
preferred a different title. A title can establish a context, or it can create a
tension. The poet James Wright's titles set the tone, locate the poem and
create suspense. Here is one to ponder-"As I Step Over a Puddle at the End
of Winter, I Think of an Ancient Chinese Governor".Brian Smeaton's title
really impressed. I loved it. "No One Better No One Worse" sets up many
expectations in the listener, and Smeaton chose to centre on a baptism, but
we need to know this from the poem, and not from an introduction. Still, who
wouldn't embrace the concept in "We're all the one /and all different".
Claire mc Donnell read a poem "Maytime Woodland" from her book.Her
descriptive abilities are excellent, and there were lines that brought the poet
Alison Brackenbury to mind. Mc Donnell has the most gentle of voices, and
could lull a hornet's nest to calm. Lovely. The poem Patricia Morris read had
a title that evoked a painter's palette: "Where Blue meets Blue".A poem has
emotion, idea, physical setting, language, image, rhythm and tension. At least
one of these must be made important to the reader/listener as soon as possible
and Morris chose the physical setting of Five Finger Strand as her focus in the
opening lines "The backbone of the Bay has broken/ along the fault line". The
metaphor of a broken coast and its imagery is a difficult one to maintain in a
poem as long as this, and again I thought the use too rhetorical, although this
is a poet with a keen eye and a deep understanding of pain. In a lyric poem
pacing is integral. Whatever it was that drove the poet to write the poem is
what moves it forward and clarity is vital. Donal Kavanagh's poem entitled
"Chimney Sweep" plays with stereotype and subject matter. He says poetry
is "about mothers, potatoes, turf smoke/you know/authentic shite like that"
and although these tropes are almost cliched they rejected Yeats idealising
of the peasant and fought against privilege of birth. It is his tone that saves the
poem, and I think there will be more parodies to come, maybe with a sly
jab at some of the more dangerous tropes. Great fun. Jean Murray's poem
"Garden Shenanigans" adhered to a mostly regular rhyme scheme of every
second line rhyming in five quatrains. There is a misconception that modern
poetry spurns rhyme. It doesn't, but it must be there for a reason, if nothing
else than to further the poet's vision. I liked the fey feeling in this poem, but
balancing of content resulted in us finding out too early who "She" was. In
Alfie Bradley's "I have climbed the mountain, Dr. Zee", inspired by none
other than Dr. Seuss' "Oh, the Places You'll Go", the poet makes great
strides in six six lined stanzas leading to his meeting the Owner at its apex.
As there is a great playfulness in the language that Seuss is infamous for
the poet has made it difficult for himself with this referent, and I would
have liked a quirkier take on the lambs and ewes he met along the way.
Brid Brady's "Statistic" understands the power of less. In short lines that
cleverly play with our need for repeating patterns she addresses the way
many react to news of illness. There were two epiphanies in this poem,
and this was perhaps one too many.Kieran Devlin's "Door Opener" used
one of my own favourite images as metaphor. I wanted more historic take
and less truism. Who owns the keys? There's the rub. Great opening line
"A lot of things can open a door". Ineke Abbas' poem "I lied to you today"
explores the honesty of dishonesty, but could have been shorter. There
is a great energy and zest to her lines, which is refreshing.
The poem that I reacted to viscerally was Guy Stephenson's "I wait". This
was a persona poem.Persona poems allow poets to write what they don't
know, in order to find out what they do know. Stephenson chose as his
persona a baby. Based on an article from the Donegal Democrat in 1956,
which reported a verdict of murder against some person or persons unknown
on the body of an unknown infant, the poem intersperses the voice of the infant
with a narrative line which may or may not be the mother or a whale. We are
not sure. The opening line of the poem "My bones lie still" are suspense laden
, but the poet opts for a recalling of the infanticide rather than surprising us with
a denouement that unsettles us even further. The metaphor of a dead child is one
which has resonances in the culture and there was a palpable frisson in the room
when it was read so well by Brian Smeaton. The image half of a metaphor, in this
case the baby, needed to give additional meaning each time she speaks, and he
almost always gives this. The last verse echoes the first and kills the suspense he
had so painstakingly built. An excellently crafted and chillingly macabre poem.
The process of writing is one of discovery. Sometimes that process can lead a
poet to break new frontiers. James Finnegan's "philosophy of the face" (for artist
Helene Schjerfbeck 1862-1946) stunned, and was my Poetry choice. Ekphrastic
poems are now understood to focus only on works of art, Homer's description of
how the blacksmith god forged the famous Shield of Achilles in Chapter 18 of The
Iliad is among the earliest examples of "ekphrasis". Modern ekphrastic poems have
tried to interpret, inhabit, confront and speak to their subjects.Finnegan is inhabited
by the opus of his chosen artist, an artist I didn't know prior to reading and hearing
the poem. When a writer gives us a poem he/she presents us with a metaphor that
represents some aspect of his/her world. Finnegan embraces his multiple selves and
discards gender divides in his ability to enter and empathise with the sea and snow
of this artist's life.
The repeating pattern he sets up in the first line is that of the face-
"there is your face your face your face"
The face and what it echoes allows us to guess she is a portrait painter, and I do
not think I have ever read or heard such a chilling portrayal of the rise of fascism
as I did in his third stanza. The black mouth and the one eye protruding are omens
of fear and terror, and although the simile in this verse is slightly jarring, "like a
tintin cartoon" it works, as there is nothing quite as macabre as the cartoon, where
violence has a throwaway quality.
When Rilke was praising the painter Cezanne, he said that painting is something
that takes place among the colours, and what Finnegan does is bring us to an
emotional epiphany through the melancholy of what was obviously the increasing
isolation of this woman's work. The broken lines, the haunting quality of a face
when looked at, really looked at, the break up of the rhythm all match the emotional
epiphany at the end of the poem. I was moved to tears. In old Irish bardic schools,
poets were expected to understand the world from the point of view of a stone,
a leaf etc,, If men can look at the world from the point of view of a woman's life
in paint and be changed and moved by it, and by so doing change us to become
less binary in our gendering, then there is hope indeed. Maith thu James.
This is a long blogpost, but one I wanted to do as a way of saying Thank You to
all those who participated and made Thursday night possible. I think that every
one of the poets and fiction writers who performed will make it into print in the
very near future. I would like to thank Kaartikeya Bajpai for asking me to
co-ordinate this event and to congratulate he and his team for making their magazine
a part of the history of the literary journey of Letterkenny, and the wider world.And
finally, I would like to give an especial thank you to Eamonn Bonnar of North West
Words for his photographs and continued support. And to my mother, Grainne, for
stepping in and reading Sorrel Mae Florence's poem so beautifully when she was
too ill to attend.
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