02.05.08 : BRIEFLY FROM......

Stansted Airport, about to embark for Knock and the Strokestown Festival, thereby missing the results of the London mayoral election. I think London may be on the verge of voting in its first virtual mayor. Boris Johnson is not, of course, a living being, but a character created, then discarded, by Evelyn Waugh when he was writing 'Vile Bodies'. Possibly not vile enough.

Since Strokestown has been described to me as a marvellous festival in a place that comprises one big house and two small streets like a pair of crossed pencils, communication may not permit me to post from there, but if I can, I will. By pencil if necessary.

Enough cosmopolitanism and jetsetting. Even as I speak, my private Ryan Air jet is being cranked up by my trusty valet, Jenkins.

03.05.08 : STROKESTOWN RACES

I will eventually have to write a short monograph on the internet cafes of rural Ireland and the backstreets of urban India. Here goes.

Strokestown is bigger than I had pictured it to be, but it is still exceedingly small. The big house is, however, big, with a brutal enough history of its own as a delightful guided tour of the gardens about two hours ago brought out. We end in a 1740 gazebo with Venetian windows, intended to give a view of the (then) ongoing deer hunt. Like a telly, suggests CD. Yes, so what's on? Bloody deer again. It must be a repeat.

I arrived last night, driven from Knock airport (it sports a statue of the virgin by the wall as you drive out, Our Lady of The Car Park presumably) by a nice couple from Chester and/or Birkenhead. The festival began last night at the hotel itself, with the winners of the children's competition reading, then, after a few drinks, it was the satirical poem shortlist reading, the winner being a sung poem about Bertie Ahern. Then more drinks. First at the hotel then at the spirit-grocer's a few houses down. Though I have been to a few rural pubs in Ireland I hadn't been to one of these before. You pass through a small innocent looking grocer's shop via a plain door to a slightly larger, seething bar. There till 1.30 am, after six Jamesons but perfectly steady. […]
Readings all today, ending with James Harpur and Ciaran Carson, both beautiful in quite different ways, Harpur melancholy, monastic, mystical, like prayers shaped out of despair with the hearsay of some small light just over the horizon.

Carson is magnificent. The scope and authority is immediately apparent: there is so much of life in his poetry, a passionate human life as full of detail as a main street on a busy Saturday. But the street leads both back and forward in time. It's a proud governed excess, eyes, plate and heart all full to overflowing.

Remarkably, the sun is out and so is my money. There is but one hole-in-the-wall in town and I am off to find it.

05.05.08 : KNOCK KNOCK

Where are you? Knock. Yes, but where are you?

Knock, actually, its airport high on a hill and managing gloriously without a radar. Two wings and a prayer are all you need.

Only some six minutes to write this because I have no more change. Strokestown was a very full bag of delights with considerable liquid to follow. Last night to 3am or so. Or possibly not.

No time for a report. A copy of the Irish Independent beside me, a number of books in my bag, I have a couple of hours to read and improve myself. Home tonight and more over the next few days, in the happy days of Boris Cojoneson.

One big aeroplane, one small out on the runway. It must be a madonna and child.

06.05.08 : STROKESTOWN IN RETROSPECT

The odd thing about poetry is this: that while most claim it is no more than a dying minority art form indulged in by middle-class sensitives overdosing on vanity it is not simply that.

The fact is everyone knows what it is and what it is for. Everyone means something when they exclaim: That's sheer poetry, that is! and Look at that now! Poetry in motion! The sense of poetry is hard-wired into the human mind. It emerges out of us as a word does after silence, that moment when you are speechless then begin to form a sound. It releases and holds.

Among the prize winners this year was an investment banker who gave up his job because he wanted to write - after years of busy silence emerges a string of words that gives form to the sensation of watching people form shapes in the air with their hands, an action he speeds up in his mind, which speeding-up makes him think of birds twittering, but then of birds in cages. This seems to him important because it speaks to the experience of freedom and mortality. He does not think this - the thought I have just summarised - he sees hands forming shapes, people at Tai Chi in a park in America - the rest just arises. […]

Small town Ireland has a seething conviviality in the evenings. The bars are jammed, people move from one to the other. People understand poetry, not as a literary form - that is incidental - but as an instinct. The conviviality is generally forgiving. The actual poets, those who dedicate themselves to the art, who understand the instruments, who have a trained instinct for literary form are, by necessity, a little apart from that conviviality: they are not its voice. They are the moments beyond conviviality, a little (sometimes a long way) out beyond it at the edges where the individual elements of the conviviality awake to dawns and mirrors, to the air of nothing but a desire that does not know its end or name, nor ever can know.

In the meantime, the pond, the mud, the shoes soaked through. Then the walking on, your feet still wet, back into the bar, the words fresh in the mouth. They are, after all, your people, the only people there is. A few drinks. Then move on once more.

OK, so not Strokestown, only thoughts, and personal ones at that. I am by now a veteran, a bestrider of festivals, carrying my own reserves of vanity with me. But never mind the business of literature. Give me intelligence. Give me rawness. Give me a shape to make, one that echoes whatever it is I know of the world, and help me make it.