Michael Longley at Laurel Villa

The final event I was to enjoy at the On Home Ground Poetry Festival was a reading by the esteemed Belfast-born poet, Michael Longley, another close friend of Heaney’s, who paid his own special tribute to the writer. Having visited Seamus’ grave in Bellaghy the afternoon before he came to the festival, Longley said – “I do feel lonely.

Michael Longley, poet

“Last week in Dublin, at the ceremony declaring who the next Professor of Poetry was going to be, I was asked to read a poem and I read my favourite Heaney poem – The Harvest Bow. It’s a poem about poetry and about art and the fragility of everything.

“Before I read it I quoted Plato on the death of Socrates – ‘The sun went down and his friends went on talking.’

“That’s what we’re doing – we’re going on talking.”

Heaney himself once described Longley as ‘a keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders’ and what followed was a very relaxed reading by Longley of his own work, including pieces such as ‘Between Hovers’, The Lifeboat’, ‘Paintings’ and ‘Boat’ – a poem written for Heaney after Longley misplaced the Greek word for ‘boat’ when his friend once asked him for it…

The Harbour, Portstewart, oil on canvas by Michael McGuinness

Boat<
What’s the Greek for boat,
You ask, old friend,
Fellow voyager Approaching Ithaca –
Oh, flatulent sails,
Wave-winnowing oars,
Shingle-scrunching keel –
But, so close to home,
There’s a danger always
Of amnesiac storms,
Waterlogged words.

Longley added: “I think there’s very little difference between good prose and good poetry,” proceeding to read ‘Constellations’ and ‘Lost’, as well as a trio of love poems entitled ‘The Linen Industry’, ‘The Pattern’ and ‘Cloudberries’. With a new collection due for publication in 2014, the poet also treated the Poetry Tent crowd to a piece inspired by his little granddaughter Amelia called, ‘The Leveret’, which will appear in next year’s book.

Main: View over Ballinrees and Portstewart; Red Pillars Saloon

Longley is also reportedly working on his memoir and given the impressive body of work he has compiled over the years, the experiences he has had and the people he has worked with, I would imagine it will make for very compelling reading indeed. Like Heaney, this is an Irish poet humble in his work and only too willing to share it and was yet another coup for the On Home Ground Poetry Festival, I think, to have him along for the weekend.

[Footnote: I include more paintings in this post from the Limavady-born and now London-based artist Michael McGuinness- another incredibly talented Michael, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing prior to the festival!]

JHISS Poetry Workshop with Eoghan Walls

Having missed posting last week and, given the wealth of infomation I have to convey from the JHISS, today brings the second blog of the week and I have decided to summarise my creative writing workshop experience at the Summer School!

As a bursary holder at the JHISS, I had the option of attending one of a variety of classes and was pleased to be allocated a poetry workshop with former Derry man Eoghan Walls. As well as writing great poetry, Eoghan also teaches at the Open University and of course, participates in readings and literary festivals. (One of his OU students very handily posted this interview with the man himself.)

After the introductions were over on day one of our workshop experience, Eoghan dispensed some advice on the art of poetry writing:

“It must be the language of the body,” he said. “You  must grab them (readers) by the senses and punch them in the soul… The only way to reach abstracts is through the visceral.”

With that said, we were given 10 minutes to wander around Armagh Market Place on a lovely sunny day and simply look. When we returned we subsequently wrote what we had witnessed and then swapped our writing with each other, picking a couple of stand-out lines from our partner’s work to read to the group afterwards. My walk took me up out of the sticky heat of the Market Place to the cathedral overlooking the city and the shady gardens around it – a welcome respite from the strong sun and suitable inspiration for my poem-in-progress (which I’m now tweaking).

The lines from my writing which were picked out included, ‘a corridor of flowers heralds the way…’ and ‘little boxed off quarters of calm’, which were then incorporated into our very own group poem, ‘The Marketplace’, which saw each person read the two lines chosen from their writing to create one full poem. I have to say – it read well! I’ve included some pictures here of my walk through the cathedral gardens… the poem may follow at a later stage!

Throughout the workshops, we had the opportunity to bring in our own poems and ‘workshop’ them together, that is, give constructive feedback to each other and my offering was one previously published on this blog as part of National Poetry Writing Month – formerly entitled ‘Toast’, now re-titled as ‘Variations of Brown’ (a work in progress!) I will again, post the revised poem at a later date (otherwise this blog post will be huge!) It was this poem I was asked to read, along with others from the workshop, on the final day of the Summer School, but unfortunately I had to forgo this in favour of a family wedding, which was not to be missed!

On the subject of critiquing, Eoghan advised:

– Use positive statements first (definitely helps!), picking out any particular elements you liked

– Give three areas where you think improvements could be made

– Omit the personal – keep it on the poetry!

“In poetry, everything makes a statement,” he said. (e.g. punctuation) “Inconsistency with punctuation is risky!”

As for what poetry actually is…

“A poem is something where the sentence ends before it normally should. It has a different form of punctuation.”

Our next task was to consider the poem ‘Terezin‘ by Michael Longley –

‘No room has ever been as silent as the room

‘where hundreds of violins are hung in unison.’

I will leave this open for those who know/don’t know the poem to consider. I didn’t immediately know what it referred to, but still took from it the sense of loss. The point being here also, that the title of a poem can be very powerful and should be chosen with as much care as the actual words within it. A title can carry weight and levitas and tell a lot about your poem without requiring the poet to include lengthy explanations in the piece itself.

We also looked at the poems ‘Seeing Fresh’ and ‘The Day Lady Died’ as examples of how to structure poetry and of course – LINE ENDINGS! For example, ‘glistening torsos sandwiches’ doesn’t look as if it should go together but in the first poem it does – it makes sense within the writing and how the lines are structured subsequently packs an extra punch to the reader. Again, the titles convey additional meaning without having to refer to specifics.

Poetry is ‘language punching you in the soul’ and requires, said Eoghan, the same components as a painting: a foreground, background and between the two – a surprise.

This is again, just a glimpse into my personal workshop experience at the JHISS and I came away from it with increased confidence in my poetry writing, more knowledge on form and content and with some useful advice on titling work and line endings! Indeed, another poem we studied was ’13 Ways of Looking at Line Endings’ (original title insert ‘a blackbird’, by Wallace Stevens!) We were tasked with deciding where the poet had inserted the original line endings, which was a good way to focus in on this aspect of poetry writing.

Amongst those at the workshop, I made some good friends – including Sinead Coll (pictured above beside Ben Simmons and Annie, from another workshop). I should also note here that, given that I had blogged before I went to the JHISS about the poet James Simmons and looking up his work, I didn’t twig until I came home that I’d been sitting beside his son for most of the week…