A PLANNING application by the Northern Ireland poet, Mr James Simmons, resulted in the councillors of Larne, Co Antrim, voting this week that his recent published work should be banned from schools as "filth".
The 63-year-old Derry-born poet was stunned when the planning committee hearing concerning his "Poets House" educational centre at Islandmagee turned into a bitter squabble about sexual allusions in his poetry.
A DUP councillor, Mr Bobby McKee, produced a copy of Mr Simmons's most recent collection, Mainstream, which he said had been sent to him anonymously. He criticised several works in it, in particular one which he said was essentially about "sex on a train".
A heated debate ensued, and a UUP councillor, Mr Roy Beggs MP, former chairman of the North Eastern Education and Library Board, proposed that the board be asked to ban the book from schools.
Despite protests by other local representatives that the issue had nothing to do with planning matters, nine councillors voted to write to the board and ask for the ban. Mr Willie Cunning told them they had stepped back into the Stone Age.
Mr McKee told BBC Radio Ulster yesterday that a poem called Rainbow "gave graphic details of having sex in a train toilet". He said he found this "most offensive and, quite frankly, smut".
Speaking from Galway, where he is attending an arts function, Mr Simmons said: "It has been one of my lifelong ambitions to help release Ulster people from guilt and furtiveness over sex. The poem that he is talking about describes a happily married couple making love - triumphing over the filth and dirtiness of the Northern Ireland Railways toilet to produce joy and happiness."
He said the poem was in an ancient tradition from the Song of Solomon to Sappho to John Donne to Blake and Robert Burns, D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce - "people like that have been celebrating the satisfactions and wonder of love in the same terms as I am celebrating it". He thought it was a great duty of writers "to combat the furtiveness and guilt-ridden religion that spoils so many lives".
Mr Simmons, whose grand-father was a Presbyterian mayor of Derry, Sir Frederick Simmons, has been conducting MA courses in creative writing for Lancaster University at the centre in Islandmagee. His planning application for a change of use of the premises from residential to charitable, educational and business has been dogged by objections from neighbours that the poetry courses cause disruption.
One of Mr Simmons's graduate students has won the Kavanagh Poetry Award and he has four MA students from the United States, Scotland and Ireland.
Although some councillors said it would be a great loss for the area if such a seat of learning was disallowed, the Larne committee voted eight to five in favour of refusing his planning application. A final decision on it will revert to the Department of the Environment.
Mr Simmons's work is included in several poetry collections, some of which are on schools curricula, and his new book, Mainstream, is published by Poolbeg Press.