Poet Matt voices the painful loss of Writers’ Week
IT takes a poet to articulate the sadness of an entire town at the loss of a major festival to COVID. Matt Mooney rose to the task as ever when asked by Writers’ Week to voice his own feelings on the matter, in a week in which Listowel should have been coming alive to hordes of visiting writers and readers.
The Kerryman is delighted to present an excerpt of Matt’s incisive and entertaining take: “CLOSED. Dúnta. Fermé. Cerrado. Next up was Writers’ Week. Will run again though, undoubtedly, and will end up in the international winners’ enclosure of fame looking out on the Island Racecourse whenever they get the ‘Off!’ there again. A fifty-year-old, many times over Becher’s Brook in the Literary Stakes held in Listowel since 1970. What a horse, a veritable Pegasus, always inspirational, always a winner and beautiful in all its lines to boot.
“Truth is summer is here and Writers’ Week is nowhere to be seen on the horizon as expected...
“So here I am thinking back of the way it was. Among my earliest recollections of the early years of Writers’ Week is the sound of the voice of Tim Danaher on the record in which he featured ‘ A Gift of Ink’. That memory always symbolises for me the heart’s core of this annual literary, artistic and musical event held in Lovely Listowel. I especially remember giving it as a going away present to a daughter of the town, who loved it as well, when she was returning to South Africa. Listowel people are lucky people. They have a great heritage.
“Seats are at a premium for every glorious opening night no matter what the year. Maybe it was because initially I used be a last-minute punter, but I have a preference myself for the seats in the grandstand in the bar at the back, where I can see without being overseen.
“The national lock-down could be looked upon as a prolonged weekend off across the board that nobody wants any longer. There is a great desire about for someone to release the pause button that has been pressed by the Virus, and for someone to press play again by coming up with a vaccine for it. This never-ending period of keeping our distance and of isolating ourselves, with its dearth of social and family interaction, since soon after the quietest St Patrick’s Day in living memory without its parades, could be nick-named ‘ The Longest Day’.
“I like to look at it like this. Writers’ Week weather is usually sunny and warm and a time for airing your stories, songs and poems not just in the halls, rooms, theatres and bar lounges late at night but ‘amuigh fé’n spéir’, outdoors in the sun in the arena in front of the Castle and the Seanchaí Literary Centre in the afternoon – a veritable ‘ la plaza de toros’ for the faint hearted, where you rise or fall by your performance in front of the awaiting with interest summer clad circle of local and visiting poets and writers. A giant of a man that stands out in the crowd every year is the larger-than-life white-bearded bard, Patsy McDermot, with epic humorous recitations delivered in his mellifluous Cavan accent to his enraptured audience.
“Yes, it’s the time of the year for thistle or dandelion down. Anyway, at the moment it’s floating about up the hill here and lodging like snow on the edge of the hedge around the house, reminding me of a moment in time, one Writers’ Week down by the riverside and a few lines of mine entitled ‘ Thistledown’ from my book Falling Apples:
“‘ Thistledown: flight so light, floating summertime on river air; on the bank first kisses.
In the same poetic vein this stanza is from a poem I wrote a long time ago but never saw the light till now entitled ‘A Writer’s Weakness’:
‘Some lunchtime Patrick Kavanagh in the day-dark of St John’s Centre presented in a song and poetry show, a sean-nós singer singing Úna Bhán; there were men talking farm talk - Monaghan accents in Tarry Flynn;’ “I’ll miss Billy Keane’s Healing Session on the Sunday afternoon and the frenetic forming of a weaving chain of revellers after the singing of the pub’s anthem, ‘ The Black Hills of Dakota’.
On a good day there if you managed to work your way in you could meet the likes of John Sheahan the poet and violinist from The Dubliners, and he would charm you with his wonderful playing or with one of his poems. One year he turned up at our Cúirt Filíochta in the Seanchaí and read a dán as Gaeilge for us. At the same venue, in Billy’s, you could be lucky to be there when the also genial poet Stephen Murphy from North Leitrim is performing. His ‘Before you push the Chair’ went viral on You Tube after the Healing Session of 2018.
“A social encounter in the Hotel with one of Ireland’s greatest bilingual and beloved poets, Michael Hartnett from West Limerick, remains strongly in my memory. Gabriel Fitzmaurice, a great friend of his, was with him. It led to a short poem ‘ To Michael Hartnett’ and I will give you an excerpt from it to remind you of him:
‘ Once in crossroads conversation sitting around in the Arms Hotel in the quiet before Writers’ Week, I put it to you as to where I was or If I was on the right bus at all. ‘Are you a poet?’ you threw at me in a voice that put me sitting up, knighting a vagrant soul-searcher strangely by a serious challenge - led by the beck of your tilted cap’. “I’ll miss the razzmatazz of it all. It has always been and will continue to be, hopefully, the most important event of the year, for me anyway. The irony of it is the world and its mother would have been coming to Listowel in a few weeks time and we’ll have to forego the pleasure of meeting them and hearing them in person while at the same time we’re stuck where we are and Kerry Airport is as useful to us as an ATM in a bog. Looking forward to the shutters going up again on our daily lives. I long for real-time social encounters and the embrace of family and friends once again. The sharing of love and life in real time is on ice all over the place at the minute.
“Madeleine O Sullivan when she was chairperson of the Week said in 1984: ‘Now is the time to move beyond the native towards the creation of an international festival of literature, in all the languages, a celebration of the living word in all its forms, a polyglot panorama of international imagination’. That is why its cancellation after so many years of doing just that is such a blow to the organisers, just when the festival was about to celebrate its Golden Jubilee, its full maturity, its age of wisdom.
“But really what is it I will miss most in a few weeks time? In short I will miss the unexpected filling of the senses from events like the show as Gaeilge on the life and singing of Edit Piaf by the late Séamus Ó Muirthile, Colm Ó Brian’s Choral Group singing at openings. Can one ever forget the riveting performances of poets and writers who were household names or if not went on afterwards to be very well known, due in no small way to their success in the Writers’ Week literary competitions.
“The word will not be made flesh this year. Can we ever forget Brendan Kennelly’s reading of his poem ‘Begin’. We need to hear that poem of yours more than ever now Brendan what with lock downs and shut downs:
“‘ Though we live in a world that dreams of ending, that always seems about to give in, something that will not acknowledge conclusion insists that we forever begin’.