Monumental Montague: The public landmark birthdays of a number of senior statesmen of Irish letters which began last year was a remarkable phenomenon which one of them, John Montague, spoke about at the Paris leg of his own 80th birthday celebrations last weekend. The birthdays – of Tom Kinsella (80), Brian Friel (80), Seamus Heaney (70) and Michael Longley (70), as well as himself, must, said Montague, signify something.
Friel, Heaney, Longley and himself, he noted, were all more or less from the North. “How much suffering does it take to produce a poem or a play, and what is being asked of us now? After the Famine, the Church had to fill an extraordinary vacuum, after the country had lost a large part of its population, and its language. But it was the conservative church of Pio Nono, of Papal Infallibility and the Immaculate Conception, and it is not weathering well. This procession of writers, like a line of cardinals, suggests that people are trying to pay us the compliment of believing that we have been trying to get it right. I mean nothing grandiose; we are only scribes, but we have a responsibility, wonderfully summarised by Tom Kinsella: ‘The times were bad/And we were in bad hands./There was nothing to be done/Only record.’”
Montague was speaking at a lunch in the Irish Embassy on Avenue Foch, most memorably interrupted by the Ambassador, Paul Kavanagh, to announce – given that some of the guests were American, with Montague born in Brooklyn – that Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize.
A tribute to Montague was the highlight of Poésie et Prose, a three-day festival of Irish literature at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in the Irish College on Rue des Irlandais organised by its director Sheila Pratschke, at which participating writers read their favourite Montague poems.
Reading Montague's There Are Days, poet Dennis O Driscoll said he admired it for having found the simplest words and images to plumb the emotional depths. "I also think of it as a poem of artistic renewal and therefore an appropriate poem with which to salute John Montague at 80 for continuing to enrich the pool of Irish poetry, continuing to be a far-seeing diviner, continuing indeed to be the inspired love poet and prophetic poet adumbrated in the last line of this poem."
The high point of the event was Montague's reading of his own poem The Family Piano. "My cousin is smashing the piano/He is standing over its entrails/ swinging a hatchet in one hand/and a hammer handle in the other/like a plundering Viking warrior . . .", read to a packed auditorium with a gusto that belied his 80 years.
New creative avenue
Some Blind Alleys (someblindalleys.com), an online journal of new Irish writing and visual art, based in Dublin, was launched last night by Man Booker prizewinner Anne Enright. Started last year, it publishes essays, short stories and translations, as well as graphic essays and stories, short films and animation. It is edited by Greg Baxter, essayist and fiction writer, whose memoir, A Preparation for Death, will be published by Penguin Ireland in 2010. He worked as a creative writing tutor in the Irish Writers' Centre before launching workshops at Some Blind Alleys. "Some Blind Alleys is all about supporting fresh, visionary, compelling and original Irish voices and artists. It is an adversary to the status quo," says Baxter.
The winners of its inaugural writing competition were also announced: Cathy Sweeney for her short story The Coin Machine;Susan Leahy for best essay with My Obsession with Endstations; and Nora Butler for her translation of The Crooked Hat,by Kurt Tucholsky. The judges were Ed OLoughlin (short story), Tim Robinson (essay) and Diego Fasciati (translation).
