The older one gets the harder it is to attempt to distinguish between what experience teaches and the exhaustion that is a natural consequence of so much living. Between being tired and being tired of. Is it, for instance, wisdom or indifference that tells me the widespread notion of a contemporary renaissance in Irish poetry is a nonsense? Perhaps it's both.
If so, a problem arises: either way, how should one avoid depressing the reader, or, indeed, oneself? Patrick Kavanagh, who knew the dangers of boredom - it might even be said that the peril of ennui was the grit in his oyster - reminded himself that there were "people in the streets who steer by my star". Having been one of those people, I know that what Kavanagh said was true, and I remember how exciting it was to walk in streets where it was altogether possible to come upon that unruly god engaged in making his own importance, and to feel more alive because of it.
Am I right in thinking, or wrong from exhaustion, that there are no stars to steer by now? It's not that there aren't good poets around. There are (and among them there is one I find increasingly exciting to read - I mean Michael Hartnett). Yet I have the sensation not only that there is no one abroad in the streets starry enough to steer by now, but that there aren't all that many people who wish there was a sidereal somebody. That's an awkward sentence, as sentences with so many negatives incline to be, but the awkwardness is more deep-seated than the language has room for.
Coleridge said that "suppression leads to overflow". In post-second World War Ireland, the now altogether vanished country I grew up in, most poets in this part of the island took it for granted that what weighed down on their creative waters was not political suppression as such - after all, we were part of an independent state - but social, cultural and psychological repression, and especially, as the word-change indicates, sexual repression.
Now, it is, I believe, an illusion to think that poverty, either material or of the spirit, provides fertile ground for any kind of flowering - one might say the idea goes against the grain. In culture, as in agriculture, "stony grey soil" produces poor and stunted crops. The poets of my generation who aspired, as some did, to transcendental heights, believing that poetry could supplant religion as, in Marx's words, "the heart of a heartless world", had more than ego problems to deal with - that way, of course, leads to Wordsworth's "despondency and madness" and was often followed; they also had to contend with the fact that poetry, however desperate, has to begin in some kind of gladness.
Even so, repression was a given, the oyster the grit couldn't function without; "I had a myth that was a lie but it served" (Kavanagh again).
The decline in the power of the myth was, historically speaking, less a death than an occlusion. Skirmishing with the nobodaddy gods of drink and sex and cigarettes (particularly the funny kind - it's time, indeed it's high time, someone wrote a thesis on the influence of dope on recent Irish poetry) became inextricably implicated with, and hidden by, the violence in Northern Ireland. Everyone, and not just poets, has been stunted by this disaster, and even if, hope against hope, the Good Friday Agreement presages some kind of resurrection, it will not be a Redeemer who emerges from the tomb but a Lazarus, much shrunken.
Theodor Adorno said, famously and foolishly, that after Auschwitz poetry was impossible. The euphemistic "Troubles" in the North were (that past is tense) our Auschwitz, and I fear that the poetic response to them, like that of society at large, was muted almost to inaudibility. Faced with murder, we lost our voice, or if not spoke instead a cabbage language of domestic things. Cabbage is also slang for cash, and the availability of money, both in society at large and for the arts via the state, has diminished the prospects of creative unhappiness of the old sort. Poets starving nowadays are as rare as garrets - not that anyone in Ireland makes a living wage from verse, bar Seamus Heaney and, perhaps, Paul Durcan. And even if garrets did exist the property section of this newspaper would advertise them at a price beyond the means of first-poem buyers.
And what is the result? What is the result of a painful, undescribed history, of readily available publication for poets (but, it might be added, a shortage of energetic little magazines), of a proliferation of prizes and bursaries, of a multiplicity of multidisciplinary critical theories? Setting aside the irritation caused by the fact that most of those who proclaim the renaissance of poetry plainly rarely read it, I fear that the reality is on the whole insignificant, marked by a strange feeling of homelessness.
Brian Lynch is a poet and critic