'There's nothing like a good symbolic act to give you a sense of achievement." So says the narrator of A L Kennedy's So I Am Glad and over the past few months, once a week or so, I've found myself in full agreement.
My own version is this: I take the stack of books by the writers due to appear in this year's Dublin Writers Festival (writers from 10 countries, and most of whom I've never actually met). Then more or less at random, though I hope not without respect, I open one of them, at any place, and from the first few sentences take something and write it down.
"You see, Father had a vision, God help us," writes Guyana born, now Miami-based poet Fred D'Aguiar in his long, hypnotic narrative poem 'Bill of Rights' (about the Jonestown mass suicides of 1978), and the line finds itself connecting to a poem of my own in progress, memories of my own father never settling down. (Auden's "poetry makes nothing happen" is untrue on at least this one level: poetry makes other poetry possible.)
Though lines and phrases taken out of context like this may not capture much of the meaning of the originals, in a strange way they help to forge a secondary but an all-important link, to throw unexpected sparks of light into the darkened powder keg of my administrations.
The fact is that, despite the growing anticipation, and excitement, there is a slightly unsettling aspect to programming a writers' festival, at least the way I have gone about it, which is the only way I could. For one thing, often I have little to show after long periods of work. Ever since my first encounters with a computer, 10 years back or so, with Theo Dorgan in the days when Poetry Ireland was still an underground movement (i.e., when we were working from a basement), the promise of a clutter-free office has hugely appealed to me.
No doubt it has something to do with the fact that my father, war-baby that he was, never once intentionally threw anything away, including old newspapers, bottles, cans and bags, anything that might someday find a use. A laptop now, with digitised faxes from Meir Shalev in Jerusalem or e-mails from Dennis Haskell in Australia or Emma Donoghue, wherever she is, makes the dream of the paper-free environment a weirdly-wonderful reality. Apart from a note from Mβire Mhac an tSaoi or the calligraphic penmanship that announces a suggestion, or another encouragement, from Dennis O'Driscoll, many days the books are all there is to hold on to. Which is as it should be.
"Nothing in the post today except a statement of interest for the Admiral," writes Indian novelist Amit Chaudhuri in his latest novel, the beautifully-observed A New World. And nothing in the post for me either, except a statement from the bank, though there have been a few dozen e-mails, jpeg images of writers, and automatic forms coming in from the website - from Finland, the US, Canada, Japan.
"I never found out what Hanna did when she wasn't working and we weren't together." Bernhard Schlink's chilling reminder of a world outside our knowing stops me cold. People are haunted by stories, others become hunters for them. I've been up half the night, searching for biographical notes in books, on the Internet. I like to work in my own time, in my own way, holding to patterns that have worked for me as a writer, and I'm blessed that my employers in Dublin Corporation make allowances for me. But there's always the world, meetings, appointments. "Is not me," V. S. Naipaul's Biswas says. "Is not my land. I just doing a job and drawing a salary."
"'How come I fell in love with her?' Jacob whispered with pleasure," writes Meir Shalev in the Second of his Four Meals. And now I think of my girlfriend, dreaming of her two weeks' break, just days away, in sunny Siracusa. Am I talking festival day and night? Do I remember there are two of us these days?
Again and again I go back for a line but fall for the sweep of whole poems by American Billy Collins, a current favourite of mine, his image of the "dented goosenecked lamp / with its steady benediction of light" brought to life night after night before me.
Festivals come together in unpredictable ways. Colm T≤ib∅n wonders about a reading by Naipaul and McGahern, Peter Straus helps put it in place; Greg Delanty makes a bridge to Billy Collins, Evelyn Conlon to Jill Paton Walsh; fellow Laoisman abroad Seamus Hosey lays a trail of crumbs to Canadian Jane Urquhart - who, it transpires, is only down the way, resting up in Kerry.
There's chance and grim determination, as well as not so grim. With a relatively small budget, there's also a lot of luck and favours. "Is letting go the thing that keeps her steady?" Thomas Lynch wonders in the beautiful poem about his daughter, 'Skating with Heather Grace', to which of course I answer, yes. Then Paula Meehan adds (in 'Bog of Moods'), like Zebedee when it's time for tea, or sleep: "Glory be to whimsy / and misreading."
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