[A. E. Stallings]

It has come to my attention that this year marks the centennary of the birth of Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh. I don't think he has been featured yet on these pages. I am rather hoping one of our members more familiar with his work will chime in here with some insights or an appreciation!

I'll post a couple of his sonnets:

Come Dance with Kitty Stobling

No! no! no! I know I was not important as I moved
Through the colourful country, I was but a single
Item in the picture, the name, not the beloved.
O tedious man with whom no gods commingle.
Beauty, who has described beauty? Once upon a time
I had a myth that was a lie but it served:
Trees walking across the crest of hills and my rhyme
Cavorting on mile-high stilts and the unnerved
Crowds looking up with terror in their rational faces.
O dance with Kitty Stobling I outrageously
Cried out-of-sense to them, while their timorous paces
Stumbled behind Jove's page boy paging me.
I had a very pleasant journey, thank you sincerely
For giving me my madness back, or nearly.

Inniskeen Road: July Evening

The bicycles go by in twos and threes -
There's a dance in Billy Brennan's barn tonight,
And there's the half-talk code of mysteries
And the wink-and-elbow language of delight.
Half-past eight and there is not a spot
Upon a mile of road, no shadow thrown
That might turn out a man or woman, not
A footfall tapping secrecies of stone.

I have what every poet hates in spite
Of all the solemn talk of contemplation.
Oh, Alexander Selkirk knew the plight
Of being king and government and nation.
A road, a mile of kingdom. I am king
Of banks and stones and every blooming thing.

[Jim Hayes]

What an excellent idea Alicia.

While Yeats and his followers wrote about a Gaelic aristocracy, Kavanagh wrote about the narrowness and frustrations of rural life. And he did so magnificiently.

Your choices above are very rewarding, this is another of my favourites;


Epic

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting "Damn your soul!"
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel -
"Here is the march along these iron stones."
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.

[Katy Evans-Bush]

Jim, you beat me to it. I was going to post Epic, which is one of my favourite poems of all time. I keep a copy of it on my pc at work (along with Justice's Ode to a Dressmaker's Dummy, the Emperor of Ice Cream, and Michael Donaghy's Glass).

In the UK his centenary is being marked by the publication of his enormous Collected tome, at some scary price. He's magnificent.

My damn kids are clamouring for the iMac, so I have to stop here, but I will post something more in when I can. I also want to post something by Paul Durcan, ABOUT Kavanagh, his great hero.

KEB

[oliver murray]

Thanks, Alicia, for posting this – I hadn’t realized it was Kavanagh’s Centenary year. He is generally recognised in Ireland as the most important Irish poet of the generation succeeding Yeats and an inspiration to Heaney and Paul Durcan among others. He was the champion of the rural and the individual, of “things that are of no importance to newspapers and politicians.” He said that if poets are to ignite the “dancing flame of imagination” then they must become impersonal and, crucially, learn how not to care.

For those who may not know much about him, Patrick Kavanagh was the comparatively uneducated son of a peasant farmer and shoe-repairer in Inniskeen, Co Monaghan. He came second in a poetry competition in the Dundalk Democrat (the winner submitted Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees”) After he moved to Dublin to begin his great quarrel with the literary establishment there, he rejected much of his early work as “stage Irish” and later even dismissed the work of his middle period on which his reputation was founded, such as The Great Hunger (1942). He is the author of a very readable autobiography, “The Green Fool” and a brilliant comic semi-autobiographical novel “Tarry Flynn.” His existing “Collected Poems” edited by his brother, contains a lot of juvenilia and occasional rantings and splutterings in barely formed prose which would never have seen the light of day in “The Bell” or “Encounter” but is, on the whole, full of good stuff.

He held court in various hostelries in Dublin in the forties and fifties and kept a stern eye on the “standing army of Irish poets” which he numbered at about six thousand, so far as I remember. Sometimes a young poet would have the temerity to be introduced to him and Kavanagh might sometimes concede, after being bought a few drinks, that something the youngster had written had “merit,” or that he might have merit thrust upon him in the future. Kavanagh would then usually borrow a tenner off him “until next Saturday.” So far as I know female poets did not exist in Kavanagh’s lexicography, although he believed beautiful women were capable of “recognising the baste” particularly if they had a taste for the unusual. People who were aspiring (or pretending to be) poets, when asked if they had published (or even written) anything lately could gain a lot of respect by staring gloomily into the middle distance and muttering “Paddy Kavanagh still owes me a tenner” thus suggesting the possession of “merit” or possible future greatness.



Here, apart from the ones posted above, are a couple more of my favourites.

Shancoduff (1937)

My black hills have never seen the sun rising,
Eternally they look north towards Armagh.
Lot’s wife would not be salt if she had been
Incurious as my black hills that are happy
When dawn whitens Glassdrummond chapel.

My hills hoard the bright shillings of March
While the sun searches in every pocket.
They are my Alps and I have climbed the Matterhorn
With a sheaf of hay for three perishing calves
In the field under the Big Forth of Rocksavage.

The sleety winds fondle the rushy beards of Shancoduff
While the cattle-drovers sheltering in the Featherna Bush
Look up and say: “Who owns them hungry hills
That the water-hen and snipe must have forsaken?
A poet? Then by heavens he must be poor”
I hear and is my heart not badly shaken?

*********

Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal Dublin “Erected to the
Memory of Mrs Dermot O’Brien.” (1958)

O commemorate me where there is water,
Canal water preferably, so stilly
Greeny at the heart of summer. Brother
Commemorate me thus beautifully
Where by a lock Niagarously roars
The falls for those who sit in the tremenduous silence
Of mid-July. No one will speak in prose
Who finds his way to these Parnassian islands.
A swan goes by head low with many apologies,
Fantastic light looks through the eyes of bridges—
And look! A barge comes bringing from Athy
And other far-flung towns mythologies.
O commemorate me with no hero-courageous
Tomb – just a canal-bank seat for the passer-by.

[Mark Allinson]

Sanctity

To be a poet and not know the trade
To be a lover and repel all women
Twin ironies by which great saints are made
The agonising pincer-jaws of Heaven.


=====================

If PK is right about this, I think I will put in an order for my halo now.



------------------
Mark Allinson

[Tim Murphy]

A hungry feeling
comes o'er me stealing,
and the mice were squealing
through my prison cell.
But that old triangle
goes jingle jangle
all along the banks
of the Royal Canal.

Apologies if I have misquoted.

[David Anthony]

You're quoting Brendan Behan, Tim, another fine Dublin boozer.
When I worked in Dublin, my office was adjacent to the Grand Canal, where there was a bench and an inscription to Kavanagh, who used to hang around there, when drunk. I often sat on his bench and thought about him.
He was a terrible piss-artist, God bless him.
David

[Janet Kenny]

Canal Bank Walk
BANNED POSTBANNED POST
Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal
Pouring redemption for me, that I do
The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal,
Grow with nature again as before I grew.
The bright stick trapped, the breeze adding a third
Party to the couple kissing on an old seat,
And a bird gathering materials for the nest for the Word
Eloquently new and abandoned to its delirious beat.
O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web
Of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech,
Feed the gaping need of my senses, give me ad lib
To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech
For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven
From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.

[Tim Murphy]

Thanks for correcting me, David. As an orla artisit, I sometimes misattribute.

[Mark Blaeuer]

Perhaps I wouldn't have enjoyed meeting him, but I've enjoyed his wit and honest humanity. I personally find him a better craftsman, for all his laziness and egotism, than many other famously poetic drunks.

This first one should be enshrined on the basis of the L7/L8 enjambment alone, but he squeezed in some great internal rhyme as well. In the Collected, this poem appears right after "Sensational Disclosures! (Kavanaugh Tells All)".

The Same Again

I have my friends, my public and they are waiting
For me to come again as their one and only bard
With a new statement that will repay all the waitment
While I was hitting the bottle hard.
I know it is not right to be light and flippant
There are people in the streets who steer by my star.
There was nothing they could do but view me while I threw
Back large whiskeys in the corner of a smoky bar
And if only I would get drunk it wouldn't be so bad
With a pain in my stomach I wasn't even comic
Swallowing every digestive pill to be had.
Some of my friends stayed faithful but quite a handful
Looked upon it as the end: I could quite safely be
Dismissed a dead loss in the final up toss.
He's finished and that's definitely.

And how many writers could get away with the following? Somehow I think he pulls it off. I especially love L3-6.

To Hell with Commonsense

More kicks than pence
We get from commonsense
Above its door is writ
All hope abandon. It
Is a bank will refuse a post
Dated cheque of the Holy Ghost.
Therefore I say to hell
With all reasonable
Poems in particular
We want no secular
Wisdom plodded together
By concerned fools. Gather
No moss you rolling stones
Nothing thought out atones
For no flight
In the light.
Let them wear out nerve and bone
Those who would have it that way
But in the end nothing that they
Have achieved will be in the shake up
In the final Wake Up
And I have a feeling
That through the hole in reason's ceiling
We can fly to knowledge
Without ever going to college.

Is that great poetry? I don't know, but for me it wears better than Bukowski.