Staircase Poems

LONG TIME, NO POST

2010-05-10T12:47:00.002+01:00

Greetings visitor to this blog. I no longer write much here, but check out these websites for
more up-to-date stuff: (I'll leave this blog up as an archive though)

www.alicelyons.ie

and

www.thepolishlanguage.com

If you would like to view the film in its entirely (8 min, 8 sec), email me (a@alicelyons.ie), and
I can set you up on a vimeo private view. We can't post the film online yet as it's doing the festival circuit.

new website

2008-10-23T10:24:00.002+01:00

I have a new website www.alicelyons.ie

Viewfinder, a sited poem in the Barracks, Cootehall

2008-07-28T23:36:00.007+01:00

VIEWFINDER (a sited poem by Alice Lyons, visible July 24th to September 20th)

A poem in a shed beside the Barracks, Cootehall, County Roscommon.

A trick on the old and new Cootehalls (involving mirrors).

"Poems are hard to read " (William Meredith)

If you are travelling the N4 between Dublin and Sligo, take the turning for Cootehall (between Carrick and Boyle). Follow the road for 3 kilometers and cross the bridge over the River Boyle.
The Barracks is in the village, beside the bridge and next to the arch of Coote's Bawn. The poem is outside, and no one needs to open the building for you.

Viewfinder is part of AFTER, a series of public art interventions which address the unprecedented effects of Ireland's recent economic boom on the rural landscape. Facilitated by a TRADE international artist in residence program, five artists living in Leitrim and Roscommon (Carol Ann Connolly, Gareth Kennedy, Alice Lyons, Anna MacLeod and Christine Mackey) worked for a year with New-York based artist Alfredo Jaar (www.alfredojaar.net). The events in AFTER are the results of this residency. To see the other events and schedule, go to www.AFTER.ie.--this site is just going live this week. AFTER is funded by the arts offices of Leitrim and Roscommon county councils and The Arts Council/An Chomhaire Ealaíon.

AFTER will be officially launched by Alfredo Jaar on September 6, 2008 (2-5 pm) at The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon.

+++++++++

That's the press for the project. Can you read the poem as it is in the photographs above? I don't think so.I am so familiar with it that I can't tell if it's readable on the first go or not.I'll type out the poem below, at the end of this post. Anyhow, the Barracks in Cootehall is where writer John McGahern spent a good part of his childhood, and it features, poignantly, in Memoir as the place to where he and his sisters were removed while their mother lay dying in their childhood home in Aughawillan, County Leitrim. The Barracks is now a part-time station for An Garda Siochana in Boyle. Once or twice a week a Garda is stationed in the Barracks--it's been ten years since anyone has lived there full time; the last Guard to be there in residence with his family was Frank Daly, R.I.P.

The poem that I've written and installed in the shed refers to John McGahern's short story "Korea." In that concentrated tale, a young man is in a shed beside the Barracks and overhears his father chatting with a neighbour about the possible financial remuneration to an Irish family whose son has been killed in the Korean war in the service of the American army. Earlier in the story, the young man had been perplexed by his father's uncharacteristically generous offer to help his son emigrate to America. After what he overhears, he puts two and two together, and the effect of the story is sickening; a kick in the gut when one realizes the awful greed of the father.

Fast forward fifty years or so: Cootehall is now a village overrun with holiday homes which remain largely unsold and empty. (Not to mention that they are, for the most part, aesthetically inappropriate to the character of a rural Irish village.) The developers are in danger of bankruptcy, if not already insolvent. The Barracks now appears on estate agent brochures as one of the features of the charming, historic village--with no sense of irony. An old farmer put it most succinctly to me the day he called to me from his tractor (with a wave of the hand toward the empty housing estates): "Ye have Cootehall destroyed!" It's a crying shame, and it all happened so fast that we (ye), the people of the village, were powerless to do anything before it was all too late. And there WAS a will to oppose the rapid developments as was evidenced by a petition that went around and was signed by a majority of village residents; it was just too late and too dissolute to be effective.

So this is what we are left with after the goldrush of the last ten years. The people of the village are coming to accept the changes--for what else can they do? The village development committee labours on to improve the look of the village, to hold the developers (and Roscommon County Council as the enforcement agency) to task to properly finish the developments and to repair the damage to the roads and fields adjacent to the new estates. The houses will eventually sell and be lived in by people whom we will come to call our neighbours, and Cootehall will adjust. How could it not?

But it is true that for a time we lost the run of ourselves, and we missed an opportunity to develop our village in a thoughtful, constructive, imaginative way, a way that might have included more of the interests and concerns of the local people and not solely those of speculative developers, capital investors, and banks--though these groups are not mutually exclusive. And so it remains to be seen--how will these new, large and pricey estates shape the place about which David Thomson in Woodbrook wrote: "Despite the beauty of the river, the bawn and the pub, no stranger could easily believe that this sad village is to me one of the most romantic places in the world"?

Viewfinder

In the shed beside the Barracks
in the shade of it, damp and February cool I feel
I am standing in a camera
The shed walls frame a picture
of the river and across it
sunlit luxury bungalows
all lined up to face The View

Here where a boy squatted
overheard the father's plot
(This was in "Korea")
to sell his son downriver

The Polish Language: The Year Ahead

2008-06-11T17:33:00.003+01:00

In a few minutes, I'll be starting to make a film, which should take the better part of the next twelve months. It's called "The Polish Language," and the script is the poem (of the same title) I wrote a few years ago. It will be an animated film, made with Orla Mc Hardy, who made "Wax Ear" with me (see two posts below this one to view it). Click on her name and watch "The Grass is Greener" if you'd like to see a beautiful film based on Ivor Cutler's poem (with his narration). Steve Woods, a veteran experimental animator and film-maker, is our producer.

Orla phoned a few minutes ago, and I have to call her back so that we can talk about how to start. How to start? We have been plotting, scheming, storyboarding and dreaming this film for over a year--a year spent also trying to get funding; we finally got a Frameworks award from the Irish Film Board/Arts Council/RTÉ. So now we get to make it, tra la.

The storyboard is drawn out, and we know the overall arc and visual style of the film. Simply put, the poem and the film are about the subversive force of art. And this idea is set in the particulars of Polish poetry and culture in the 20th century. (More on that later.) Hmm, we are going to make a film...Yes, I think it will be good for me to keep a log/blog of the process of making this thing...

SO the first thing to do in my mind is to decide on the font we will use. (Letterforms are central to the action of the film.) A modernist font. One used in Polish posters from the interwar period. So it's to the typography books we shall go first. And second on the list is to settle on the palette. The film is going to be in black and white and beetroot red. But what exactly is beetroot red? Do we veer toward the pinkish hints in beetroot or toward the earthier, yellower tinges in that deep red. Time to start mixing gouache.

I don't think we should start at the beginning. I think we will start in the middle and let the thing bleed out toward both ends. Beginnings are too daunting. Endings are too inevitable. The middle of this film has lots of archetypal images from Polish culture: storks, amber, honey, concrete, primeval forests... Yes, let's start with these simple images and build out from there. The image here is a very basic storyboard image for the lines from the poem: "to make an effigy, you'd need/a lot of concrete (more than you'd think)/a stork..."
Later on in the film, the stork alights on the Spire on O'Connell Street in Dublin and why not.

Tygodnik Powszecheny

2008-02-21T20:35:00.003Z

Two of my poems, translated into Polish by Justyn Hunia, appear this week in Poland's largest
cultural newspaper, Tygodnik Powszecheny (www.tygodnik.onet.pl)

Poland is a country with a formidable audience for poetry, and it's thrilling to have work published there. I await a copy of the paper in the post. It used to be a wonderfully unwieldy broadsheet with a distinctive, somewhat quirky masthead. I hear it is now more toward tabloid in format... too bad about that.

Agnieszka, above are the scans you requested (Sept. 09).

Wax Ear: a film poem (2007)

2007-12-30T19:23:00.000Z

"Wax Ear" is a film poem made by Orla Mc Hardy and me for the 15 Second Film Festival in Belfast. It is based on my poem of the same title. Full text of the poem is below. The italicized lines in the poem are from Russell Hoban's novel Riddley Walker, the whole of which is written in an invented dialect. Orla Mc Hardy is a film-maker who lives in Dublin. Last year she made an animated film called "The Grass is Greener" based on Ivor Cutler's poem of the same title; the film includes Cutler's voice saying the poem. You can find out more about Orla's work at her website; click on her name above.

Wax Ear

You oughta take God's hint
who gave you twice as many ears
as tongues. It takes years, this.
Fuck the career.
Becaws I begun to know by then
I were some kind of lissener as well.

My film poem ERASURES is now on you tube

2007-12-27T12:17:00.000Z

You can now view ERASURES, a film poem about creativity and falling in love, on You Tube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlGLlEPHolk

Film Poem Screening in Munich

2007-11-16T09:50:00.000Z

My film-poem, Erasures, will be screened at the

20th Instants Video Festival

NUMÉRIQUES ET POÉTIQUES

December 5, 2007 at The Speigel (Müchen, Germany)

www.instantsvideo.com

Poem One: Make Good

2007-02-21T11:14:00.000Z

I wrote 12 poems, one a month, from August 2005 to August 2006. The title of this one appears vertically in red letters in the second stanza as seen here beginning one riser above this fellow's feet.
Read back through the blog archives beginning with the earliest entries to see the project in its entirety.
Staircase Poems

Poem 1 Make Good All Exisiting
Poem 2 The Cleaheen Road
Poem 3 Dirty Weather
Poem 4 Zaden Bestseller/No Bestseller
Poem 5 Want/Plenty
Poem 6 Memorandum in Winter
Poem 7 Things I Didn't Know I Loved
Poem 8 A Story from Effernagh
Poem 9 Portrait of Mr. Justice Feargus Flood
Poem 10 Caution Staircases
Poem 11 Report (McGahern)
Poem 12 How Blow-ins Become Locals

Blow-in, County Roscommon (a film-poem)

2006-11-19T12:29:00.000Z

I've posted a film-poem on You Tube

2006-11-18T20:24:00.000Z

I've posted the first film-poem I've made (did it in 2004) on You Tube. It's called Blow-in, County Roscommon. I'm putting in the link below. It should work, but if it doesn't, you can go to You Tube and search for me by username, which is turkeylondon (as in turkey london broil, a specialty of the house of friend Mark Dark in South Philly!!).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gujHlz9ER8

Cutting Hedge Journalism

2006-10-30T22:43:00.000Z

Nationwide, the magazine-style RTÉ television show, airs a feature on The Dock and the Staircase Poetry project this Friday (November 3 @ 7 pm). You can view the piece by clicking on the link below:

http://www.rte.ie/news/2006/1103/nationwide.html

Where to get Staircase Poems

2006-10-08T12:37:00.000+01:00

A few folk have asked how to get the book if they're not getting it delivered through the mail slot. I was amazed to find that Amazon.co.uk will actually sell you a copy if you are willing to wait four to six weeks for delivery! But you can get it sooner if you send a request by email to Siobhán O'Malley who is the communications officer for The Dock. Her email is somalley@leitrimcoco.ie.

The book is also for sale in Dublin at the bookshop at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery in Parnell Square, The Winding Stair Bookshop on the north side of the Liffey, and Books Upstairs on Dame Street. If you come through Carrick-on-Shannon, you can get it in the Leitrim Design House, which is in The Dock or at the bookshops in Carrick of which there are now three. It is in the bookshop at the Model + Niland Gallery in Sligo too. If you post a comment here, I will be able to get in touch and see about getting a book to you. I try to check the blog comments regularly.

Delivery of books is well underway now, and if you have a big hairy dog beside your front door, well good luck to you

2006-10-05T20:37:00.000+01:00

Wednesday, somewhere along the Cleaheen Road.

The Book is Launched

2006-09-25T19:46:00.000+01:00

Steve Wickham on fiddle, Phillipe Carbonell on guitar, Anna Houston on cello and Eddie Lee on double bass: the Sligo-based quartet No Crows playing at the launch of Staircase Poems at the Dock on Sunday. A rapt young Mohillian listens.

What 10,000 Books of Poetry Looks Like (one version)

2006-09-16T20:39:00.000+01:00

Packing 10,000 poetry books into envelopes in the sunshine on Friday

2006-09-16T20:24:00.000+01:00

So this is the plan: on Monday morning, a leaftlet distribution gang from Dublin arrive to take 7800 (of the 10,000) books. They'll distribute them in the towns and villages that surround The Dock. They only do clustered settlements, i.e., those areas within 50 km speed zones. So that leaves the so-called "one-off" rural houses for myself and other folk to cover (and any friends and neighbours who'd like to volunteer distributing books down their local roads--get in touch with Siobhán at The Dock 071-9621694). A big thank you and respect to all those folk who are helping out stuffing books into envelopes. It is an education in quantity.

Meet Staircase Poems

2006-09-16T19:54:00.000+01:00

Books and Envelopes

2006-09-16T19:40:00.000+01:00

The A5-sized (C5?) envelopes the books fit into. Coming soon through your letterbox if you live near Carrick-on-Shannon.

Launch of Staircase Poems

2006-09-13T07:42:00.000+01:00

Sunday, September 24th at 2 pm
The Dock
Carrick-on Shannon

launch of Staircase Poems

there will be some music, some food and a reading/performance of
the twelve poems that comprise the project

All welcome

In which there is a pause for an intake of breath before the last leg of the project and in which I explain about the brain hemorrhage

2006-09-02T20:11:00.000+01:00

I've spent the last month working on the design of the book that will document this project: Staircase Poems. Linda Shevlin & Padraig Cunningham, two painters who have a graphic design company called Pure Design have gone to great lengths to appease my persnickety and perfectionistic tendencies during the design process. They've been saints really. The book is now in the hands of the printers, so there is time for a large intake of breath before the next and final job of figuring out how to post the thing out to 10,000 households in this area. An Post may or may not be helping us with this...more on that later.
But I mentioned the matter of a subarachnoid brain hemorrhage in a post back in June and have yet to explain. I had one. On February 2, 2006. I'll let the tone be set here by the medical website writer because, as for me, I still can't quite find the way to talk about this. Yet. But I hope to. A film-poem (a couple of them) are in the works on the subject. So here's what happened me as explained by www.shands.org/health:

A small percentage of subarachnoid hemorrhages have a nonaneurysmal pattern to them. They occur spontaneously and are usually localized ot the area of the brain called the perimesencephalic cistern. The prognosis for this type of hemorrhage is excellent. Unlike the majority of hemorrhages that are caused by arterial ruptures, this type is thought to be a venous or a capillary rupture.

I spent a week in Beaumont Hospital's neurological ward and got the finest of care in every way. Thank you one and all.

Rattlebag

2006-09-02T13:49:00.000+01:00

Caoimhín Corrigan (The Dock's managing director and Arts Officer for Leitrim) and I talked to Vincent Woods (a poet and playwright who is from Leitrim) on RTÉ' radio's arts programme

Rattlebag<

I read three poems and the text of those poems can be found on this site:

Things I Didn't Know I Loved (February archive)
Memorandum in Winter (January archive)
How Blow-ins Become Locals (August archive)

By the way, the people who do programming at RTÉ radio made a very lily-livered decision in cutting John Kelly's music show Mystery Train and axeing Rattlebag. Well, they say they've moved their arts programming to another slot: eleven o'clock AT NIGHT! Long-distance truckers with an interest in the arts are rejoicing. The rest of us are disgusted. It can only be seen as a cynical response from an organization that has the nerve to play their motto "RTÉ Supporting The Arts". The good news: John Kelly is moving himself and his ample collection of musical recordings to Lyric FM (around 97 on your dial) from 2:30 to 4:30 pm, weekdays, starting in October. Switch. And keep telling RTÉ that they've made a serious mistake.

Poem Twelve: How Blow-ins Become Locals

2006-08-06T16:51:00.000+01:00

How Blow-ins Become Locals

My senior infant makes out the message
on a Denny's rasher truck: HOME
IS WHERE YOU MAKE IT
And we pass them again,
they're filing out the Leitrim Road
bending into the rain like willows:
Kurds heading for Lis Cara
under a useless golf umbrella.
Hey! There's our Kurds!

Last night our swallows blew in
from Africa chirruping in a disused shed.
Our willie wagtail's local and mighty territorial.
Then there's the one heard at a gate
near Drumkeerin: My hippie's cuttin' hay–
what's your hippie at, so? So
it begins– the circuit of us.

Poem Twelve: How Blow-ins Become Locals

2006-07-29T04:00:00.000+01:00

We have arrived at the last poem in the project. It'll go up next week; the opening is Thursday night along with exhibitions by Malachy Costello, Helena Gorey and Stephen Rennicks.

I've loved the term "blow-in" since I first heard it used ten years ago when I was in the process of doing exactly that, blowing in to Ireland from Portland, Maine. Or to be more precise, blowing back to Ireland as the grand-daughter of emigrants. And I like the term as it's used both by members and non-members of the "caste", if you will. It's a perfect example of a coinage for the existence of The Other in rural Ireland. The term begs the question that the poem, playfully, addresses: when do you go from being a blow-in to a local? How and when does it happen, if ever? The seed for the idea of the poem comes from a story told by Michael Ewing, a longtime local of the area (before he blew in from other parts) in which he heard two farmers having a chat at the gate somewhere deep in the heart of the country. It went something like this: "My hippie's cutting hay today. What's your hippie at, so?"
And so it goes.

Notes for photos that follow this posting

2006-07-04T23:38:00.001+01:00

Photos of poem eleven, "Report", follow this posting. The texts read vertically and say :

"On the radio the politician said that Memoir made him cry for his own early losses."

"Mary said she wasn't sure she was up to reading it."

"Mike said he shed a few tears reading it in the Irish Times exerpt."

"The RTÉ television newsreader said "Ar dheas Dé go raibh a anam dílis" before moving on to the next item."

"Lila said she had never met McGahern but that he was a lovely man."

"Chris said it was heavy going and finally she couldn't hack it."

"The dentist said your man is a depressing old so and so and why bother."

"I read chapter one at my kitchen table inside what people call Packie McCabe's house"

"The text message simply read McGahern's dead."

++++++++++

The penultimate line here (though not in the installation as you read it as you walk up the stairs and turn your head, so there is no real order of lines, per se) probably needs a little explanation if you aren't real familiar with the locality. Packie McCabe is the name of the man who drove the cart that carried McGahern and his sisters to the Barracks and away from the deathbed of his mother in in that devastating part of Memoir. Packie McCabe used to live in my house; in fact, he built it. And even though I've lived in it for ten years, people still say that I live in McCabe's house. Living memory at work.
And when I was reading that chapter I was struck by the essence of (what seems to me) to be McGahern's genius: the finely etched landscape of the local infused with the general, felt experience of the human story. And at that moment I seemed to be embodying it: feeling the echoes of my own griefs that are cited far away in the New Jersey of my childhood as I read his words and was sitting practically inside the Irish localities he painted with such fidelity.

Poem Eleven: Report

2006-07-04T23:30:00.000+01:00

Photos of the installation of this poem, which traverses the plaster walls of the Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon.

Poem Eleven: Report

2006-06-29T20:31:00.000+01:00

"Report" is a poem of reported speech on the subject of John McGahern's Memoir.
I broke out of the staircase format--it's on the front wall, side wall, back wall-- kind of all over the gaff. I'm enjoying watching people craning their necks to read it. I'll have some more installation shots for you tomorrow, plus the text of the poem.

Radius from The Dock

2006-06-25T00:30:00.000+01:00

We are in the process of designing the book that documents this project, which is titled Staircase Poems. I am working with two painters who are also graphic designers, Linda Shevlin and Padraig Cunningham. More on that as it progresses.... But part of the plan for this as a public art project is that once the book is printed, we plan to post out 10,000 copies to people who live close to the Dock. So we are faced with figuring out how far out the radius from the Dock is that will encompass ten thousand households. Interesting problem. I'm in touch with the people in the planning department at Leitrim County Council about this--they are interested in such questions, thank god. If you have any guesses as to how long the radius is, please say so. I'm guessing five miles. Your turn.
Why am I posting ten thousand books of poetry to the Leitrim/Roscommon public? Well, it's mostly to do with this notion that public art projects often address the section of the public who actively "engage" in public art projects. You know the people who like to come to art centres and events and workshops and performances. But what about the folk who either don't know that anything is happening that is called "public art" for them to engage with? Or those that work at jobs that keep them out of the loop for reasons of shift schedules? And what about the introverts? Shy people? People whose confidence in their own language/culture skills is shaky so they stay away from events at the Dock?
Those are some of the reasons why I think a mass mailing may reach a different audience than usual. And there's also the notion that Joseph Brodsky espoused when he was Poet Laureate of the US--he was trying to get an anthology of American poetry put in every hotel room along with the Gideon's Bibles that are already there. His reasoning was that if the books were just there, were available, they might be picked up by someone who might just get interested. And when you get interested, you seek more. And that's how poetry finds the people who either go on to become writers or readers of poems or both.
I'm not enthusiastic about projects and programs that aim to increase the audience for poetry, per se. I do think that it finds its own audience and that the quantity of readers of poetry is not a big problem unless you earn your living selling books, which few poets do. But I do like the idea of dealing with poetry books as one deals with flyers from Super Valu. Send 'em out, and if they want to open it up and read it, fine. They might put it on the table and the kid coming home from leaving cert. poetry class picks it up and flips through it. Or it might go in the recycling bin. Or be used to prop open a window.
Seamus Heaney talked about poetry as being a force that confirms our "inwardness." He said this in a television interview with John Kelly a few months ago when District and Circle first came out here. That's just right. And I hope that this mass mailing might offer that opportunity for inward activity to some people in Leitrim and Roscommon. Hey, something different from iodine tablets anyway!

I'll be in Dublin on Friday to read some poems

2006-06-19T22:49:00.000+01:00

This Friday, June 23rd, I'm reading poems at the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre, Foster Place in Dublin (off Dame Street) at lunchtime, which is one o'clock in these here parts. I'll bring along my iBook, and if the audience is willing and able to gather round it, I'll show one of my film-poems. That is IF there is an audience--this is a poetry reading, folks! A film-poem is me taking one of my poems and animating the text and/or adding images and sound to the words. I suppose I should really call them digital video-poems BUT film is a better word AND the first one I made was with 16 mm film and a Bolex but that was a big failure in more ways than I'd like to say. I WILL try again with stop-motion and film though--just need to gather me strength. Here's a still from "Erasures" a film-poem about creative process and falling in love.

Text on Staircase in Kraków

2006-06-10T20:17:00.000+01:00

Visited many beautiful churches and synagogues in Kraków last week. My first airplane flight since mad, unexplained, catastrophic, miraculous subarachnoid brain hemmorhage in February (more later on that and thank you Djeribi for those adjectives!). Kraków is a city not to be missed. Here is text (patrons' names, I think) on the staircase leading up to Kalsztor i Bazylika Ojkow Paulinów, "Na Skalce". Beneath the basilica is a crypt where the regions leading artists and poets are buried, including Czeslaw Milosz (d. 2004).

Signage Play in the Dock

2006-05-29T10:31:00.000+01:00

I've made a few signs to put around the Dock during the run of their exhibition, IMAGINED--Visions of Architecture. Here's one:

Poem Ten: Caution Staircases

2006-05-29T09:52:00.000+01:00

Here are installation photos of the poem, "Caution Staircases". It's a visual and verbal poem, and I'm playing with the vast inventory of stock images available to sign makers everywhere and also with that slightly superior, cautionary tone that comes across in signage. It's as if whoever has written the sign is just a little fed up with how reckless we people out here in the real world can be.

Poem Ten: Caution Staircases (cannot be goosestepped up)

2006-05-22T09:56:00.000+01:00

The next exhibition at the Dock (opens Friday, hope to see ya there!) is about architecture. Go to their website to see more details, but I will say that it's a really interesting mix of exhibitors and the overarching idea of the show is sound: clear and concise. Lacking gobbledygook. Ok, that's my plug for the show (Caoimhín you can send the cheque to me directly). When I heard they were dealing with architecture, I thought I'd focus a poem toward two things I'd been thinking about recently: staircases and signage.

So the poem is half words/half pictures--the words are short statements of fact in the register of signage. And the other half of the poem is a series of images from the wacky world of signage. Some are stock images and others are manipulated in good ol' Sign Maker program. I must say it was fun making a sign that visually represented the line "cannot be goosestepped up". Because you cannot goosestep up a staircase. I dare you to try. Wear steel-tipped shoes before trying, as I don't want any bruised toes on you, my dear reader.

Can You Lend A Hand, Dear Blog Reader ?

2006-05-19T10:12:00.001+01:00

Hello there. I'm working on poem eleven, which is to do with John McGahern's Memoir. I'd begun it back in December, and it's a collage of things people have said to me about reading the book, or thinking about reading the book, or what they have heard about the book and so on. The poem will start high on the wall in the Dock, right below the clerestory windows and will read vertically down the wall and then fall onto the stairs.

But there's a missing piece, and I wonder if anyone out there can help me. Somewhere in the last year or so in all the press coverage about the book, I read that McGahern said something like this about writing it (this is rough memory at work here): "I sit down at the desk and when the tears start to flow, that's when I write." Something like that. Can you tell me where I read this?
Thanks. Alice

Street Dog of Boyle

2006-05-13T18:30:00.000+01:00

I'd been having problems locating a street dog in Boyle to post for you here. It seemed they were all in hiding for a while. The good weather has brought them out, and here is one pooch hoofing it to the sales, I guess. Poem Seven, "Things I Didn't Know I Loved" back in February, mentions Boyle's dogs.

Poem Nine: Portrait of Mister Justice Feargus Flood

2006-04-14T21:47:00.000+01:00

(the Irish Times, after publication of the second interim report of the Flood Tribunal)

They say the left eye
tells the truth.
(It's closer to the heart
some profess).
That leaves the right
for what you want
us to believe, for
your version of events.

This left eye's hooded
clammed-up, inward
keeps its own counsel
spots bullshit from a mile.
The right one laughs–
as if some wise
guy just emerged
from the long grass.

(The photograph on which this poem is based can be seen in the previous post.)

Poem Nine: Potrait of Mister Justice Feargus Flood

2006-04-13T13:40:00.000+01:00

The next poem is a portrait of a photographic portrait of this fellow who goes by the name of Mister Justice Feargus Flood. The photo, taken by Cyril Byrne of the Irish Times, appeared in that paper a few years ago when Justice Flood had just published the second interim report of his Tribunal into Certain Planning Matters (as it says on the stationary). Here's the picture, and I'll post the poem in the next thingy.

Poem Eight: A Story From Effrinagh

2006-04-08T10:20:00.000+01:00

Effrinagh is a place about five miles east of Carrick. It remains a quiet place in spite of its proximity to the bustle and hustle of Carrick. It's dotted with lakes and traversed by boreens the Council doesn't much get around to looking after. Jim Gralton came from Effrinagh, where he built his Pearse-Connolly Hall before he was deported to New York. If you're not from this area and you've heard of Effrinagh, it's likely because of the Gralton connection.

I heard a story about a woman who lived in Effrinagh who, as they say here, had the cure. That means she had the power to heal the sick. I don't know what her particular cure cured. But the story about how she got her powers made the hairs on the back of my neck quiver. It's said that one of the last men to be hanged beside the courthouse in Carrick was an innocent man. All the people knew it. So the parish priest in Effrinagh said to this woman that if she were to get a piece of the rope used to hang that man, there would be power in it. So she did and sure enough she got "the cure". And she lived out the rest of her days healing people's ails.

I thought of this story when I first began the project. I spent a good deal of time poking around the Courthouse while it was being renovated. It seemed to me that there was a whole legacy of badness in that building. Even the guys on the construction crew who were from far-flung places such as Moldavia and Poland could sense the bad "juju'. An acquaintance who is a historian of the area told me that if the stones of the courthouse walls could talk, they'd be screaming at the injustices and horrors they'd witnessed. And if you read the records of that court, especially in the years of the Famine, it will drive you near despair. Children being given 40 lashes for stealing apples. Page after page of this. It had to be acknowledged--not plastered over.

And the story of the cure in Effrinagh struck me as a parable, an instructive tale about how we might live now. I felt we had to open our eyes to the sordid history of that building. Thus, the first stanza (the poetic form is called a triolet, that is the first line is repeated three times in the poem) which echoes He dangled in the air. And after the recognition of the injustices meted out there, the second stanza offers one way to live in light of that history. The line repeated three times in this stanza is Retrieval is an art. Retrieval is one of those laden words that, like a tuning fork when struck, reverberates with associations. Historians are great retrievers as are some writers and artists and musicians. The Courthouse has been re-imagined and re-novated into the Dock and at the fulcrum of this shift is art. These changes were made for the purposes of art, and perhaps, art may be the force that helps us come to terms with what happened inside those walls in centuries past.

I'm not usually given to explaining what I write in this way. I feel that the work must be failing at some level if this kind of thing is called for. And that may be the case. But many people have said that they found this poem very dark. Stark even. And I wouldn't disagree.

Leitrim Observer Does Good

2006-04-06T09:33:00.002+01:00

The Leitrim Observer deserves a big round of applause for the coverage they have given to the late John McGahern. The two-page spread, with a variety of excellent photographs, does the man--and the county he so loved--justice. It's just a pity that John himself won't be turning the pages of this edition of the paper. As many people have said in so many different vignettes of the last week--John would have loved this.
This week's Observer also covered the recent meeting of the Leitrim County Council. I love reading the comments from so many representatives wanting to go on record as having read and loved McGahern's books or recalling having met the man who as Cllr Caillian Ellis said, "was one of the great characters, particularly when he was out socializing with the old characters, who are also deceased." Members of the Council were proposing all kinds of ways to commemorate him. I will throw in my two cents here and say let's not rush this. The best work of commemoration has been done already, that is, in his writing. Leitrim (and North Roscommon as well) and McGahern are and will in the future always be linked inextricably. As Yeats with Sligo and Kavanagh with Monaghan. One thing though--it'll be important for the Council to make sure that the places mentioned in McGahern's books are seen as part of our region's heritage and preserved as such. They needn't be cordoned off and surrounded by interpretive centres. I don't mean that. But they shouldn't be bulldozed and covered by Lidls or housing estates either.

Outside the Barracks, Friday at sundown

2006-03-31T23:52:00.000+01:00

John McGahern died today

2006-03-30T22:53:00.000+01:00

The woman behind the counter in a shop in Carrick-on-Shannon wiped her tears. We had just heard the news, a text on my mobile. "I'd never met him," she said, "but he was a wonderful man." He'll be laid to rest in Aughawillan on Saturday.
The newscaster on RTE tonight broke with journalistic "objectivity" when she uttered "May God rest his soul" in Irish before moving on to the next item. Wouldn't see that on CNN.

Poem Eight: A Story From Effrinagh

2006-03-18T13:22:00.000Z

He dangled in the air.
The rope was made of flax.
The trial wasn't fair.
He dangled in the air
Beside the courthouse where
The truth got mauled by facts.
He dangled in the air.
The rope was made of flax.
+ + +
Retrieval is an art.
She saved the piece of rope
That yanked his life apart.
Retrieval is an art.
The cure worked on the heart
With flax and words and hope.
Retrieval is an art.
She saved the piece of rope.

Urinal Interlude

2006-03-06T11:11:00.000Z

Now that we're moving into springtime (in Ireland at least), I suggest visitors to the Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon venture outside to the back of the building and take a look at the Victorian urinal there. Yes, urinal. It used to be rusty and nearly obscured and destroyed by ivy (as in my pre-renovation photo), but it's now been saved, brushed up and sprayed with flashy silver paint. To think this thing might have just succumbed to ivy and rust.... It's a fun relic from the past, especially the words of warning (see photo) that are stamped into the iron above each, um, user's position. For those urinal-spotters among us, it's from a cast ironworks in Glasgow. Yet another innovative contraption from our Scottish brothers and sisters.

Poem Seven: Things I Didn't Know I Loved--photos

2006-02-27T11:36:00.000Z

Here are installation photos of the seventh poem in the series. A big thank you to Fionna Murray for the handwriting, Austin Ivers for technical prowess and Hazel Walker (of Aberdeenshire) for her helping hands. To read the poem in its entirety, go down to the posting for Feb. 15.

Poem Seven: Things I Didn't Know I Loved

2006-02-27T11:31:00.000Z

Poem Seven: Things I Didn't Know I Loved

2006-02-15T13:21:00.000Z

Things I Didn't Know I Loved (After Hikmet)

I didn't know I loved the street dogs of Boyle
every one, equal parts scruffed-up and old-souled
or that there was a reliable gang
of plasterers available to me at reasonable rates
if only I'd ring.
I didn't know I loved funerals, certain funerals,
how a village whips into action, Hi-Vis vests donned,
someone yells, "JOE! PRIEST CAR!" and it's directed
among traffic cones. (There's an underlying passion.)
I didn't know I loved shadows
the ones stone walls cast, how they map
a forked path to pick along.
I didn't know I loved hen parties de-bussing at the chapel
or Those Nervous Animals versus Drumshanbo Gun Club.
I didn't know I'd come to love the "u"
in colour, rumour, and neighbour
or how when a friend from Aberdeen says "odd"
it sounds, to these ears, like "awed".

Prying off all the Roofs in Leitrim at Once

2006-01-31T07:16:00.000Z

A question for you to consider: if you could hover above County Leitrim and had the ability to pry the roofs off all the houses at once, well, what would be happening down there? If you have any ideas, please say so.

This notion isn't mine--it belongs to a photographer I met once at a party years ago in South Philadelphia. I remember his name: Donald Camera--I am not kidding. Anyhow, we were talking about the wonderful goings-on in that part of the world`: the impromptu sales off the backs of trucks, the guy who "ran numbers" (passed on illegal bets) by standing in his bathrobe on the street holding half a loaf of Italian bread and passing the loaf, a kind of relay baton/numbers hoagie, to a guy walking by. This sort of thing. Anyhow, it was Donald who said then that if you were to simultaneously pry off the roofs of all the houses in South Philadelphia, about 70 percent of what you'd see would be illegal.

Poem Seven: The Street Dogs of Boyle

2006-01-28T13:32:00.000Z

Poem seven("Things I Didn't Know I Loved") takes its structure from a poem, with the same title, written by Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet. It's a poem I've always admired and it talks about the way things sneak up on us and become somehow important. It isn't until we cast the light of our attention upon them that we even know they are there or that they mean anything to us.

I'll post the poem in its entirety in the next posting, but the first two lines of my poem are "I didn't know I loved the street dogs of Boyle/ every one, equal parts scruffed-up and old-souled."

One of the guys at Silverstone, the sign shop in Dublin where I make the staircase signs, read it and said, "We've all got problems Alice, and I think you need help!" Yes. But, the street dogs of Boyle are really something! Over the years as I've passed through the town, I've always noticed the high number of street-wise, scruffed up canines there: non-pedigree, super-mongrel, who pad the sidewalks slowly as if they owned the town. And maybe they do. I saw a Dalmatian in Carrick the other day. I have seen no Dalmations in Boyle.

In fact, I think someone could make a mint if they put together a high-production-values calendar, "The Street Dogs of Boyle" for the Irish-American tourist market. Sure thing. ("The Drunks of Drumshanbo" is another calendar concept, but more problematic.)

I went round Boyle this morning with my camera so I could post a photo of one of these pooches, so you can see what I'm talking about. Not a runner. Cold morning here, and the dogs must be in their sheds or beside their Stanleys and who could blame them?

A Coincidence Concerning Poem Six and Sister Thomasina

2006-01-24T17:09:00.000Z

If you slog through this blog you'll see that poem six contains a line that is handwritten by Sister Thomasina, age 92, who lives here in Carrick-on-Shannon. She is a very energetic, retired National School teacher who writes poems as well. The coincidence I mention is this: when I was at Silverstone in Dublin a few weeks ago doing the vinyl end of the lettering that goes on the staircase, I happened to get to talking to David, from Crumlin in Dublin who was in the sign shop getting graphics put on his van. Dave was asking me a bit about the project, and I told him about Sister Thomasina and that I was hoping her handwriting would translate into vinyl and be readable as a sign. Dave perked up at the mention of the nun and said, "You know it's gas, but the other day I was just talking about a teacher I had in baby infants in Crumlin. Her name was Sister Thomasina as well, and I remember her because she was so nice to us. When we did well in our handwriting lessons, she'd hand out pilots' badges with wings on them to the boys." And he went on to say that what was remarkable to him was that he talked about her and remembered her because she had been kind and encouraging. So of course, we both wondered if "his" Sister Thomasina and "my" Sister Thomasina were one in the same. I wrote to her when I got home, and yes, she was teaching in Crumlin in the late sixties, which is when Dave would have been in her classes. I gave her his name, and I think they'll be in touch with each other.

Poem Six: Memorandum in Winter

2006-01-16T15:58:00.000Z

The handwritten part is scanned and transferred to a software program used by the guys at Silverstone, a professional signmaking company in Dublin. It's then plotted and cut in vinyl and I apply the lettering to the panels which are then affixed to the stairs.

Poem Six: Memorandum in Winter

2006-01-13T10:44:00.000Z

Poem Six is a 14 line poem about two women of two different generations, traveling at two different speeds, meeting on a boreen (back road) in County Leitrim. I wanted the lines in the poem that are spoken by an older woman to be displayed in the appropriate "hand." I was lucky enough to have some contact with the Active Age group in Carrick-on-Shannon, where I met Sister Thomasina, age 92. Sister Thomasina lives in the retirement home the Marist Sisters, and she writes poetry herself. As she taught handwriting in the national schools when she was teaching in them, she was interested in doing the handwriting for the poem. Here's her written version of the appropriate lines in the poem. Tonight I'll photograph the version of this that is displayed on the stairs. It's "translated" into vinyl. By the way, the Carrick Active Agers waltz on Monday afternoons in the community centre.

Poem Five: Want/Plenty

2005-12-28T22:51:00.000Z

I found reference to this document (the one that prompted this poem) from 1846 in the National Archives in Dublin in some things that a local historian had lent me. I was intrigued by the idea of labelling heads of households with W or P, so I went to see if for myself. It's in the Relief Commission Papers, set apart in an area of their own in the Library.It's a very tidy little handmade booklet, beautiful really. Just lists of townlands in the areas near Mohill, names and Ws and Ps. Perhaps the intentions behind the making of the list were sincere, but today it seems mostly like an act of absurdity. The elegant handwritten preface reads, verbatim: "Loughwrinn Union List. With an accurate acct of this town lands and the names of the persons seemingly distressed for subsistence living on said farms in the electoral division of Loughwrinn together with placing the letter P at the foot of every mans name where plentiness appeared and placing the letter W at the foot of the distressed mans or persons name which signifies want."

Poem Five: Want/Plenty

2005-12-28T22:40:00.000Z

I counted the numbers of wants and plentys in the original document so that I could graphically represent it in the staircase poem. Over 5oo wants, over 200 plentys. The historical significance of that is highly questionable. Anyhow, I chose a font that is very thin and spidery, and thus extremely hard to "weed" --that's signmakers' lingo for the act of pulling away the excess vinyl around the cut letters. So many hours spent "weeding" in the studio. I liked it. I miss the physicality of painting and drawing in the poetry end of things. Getting to "weed" the text and apply it with my hands to the metal panels or the limestone walls is satisfying in the way that applying warm gesso to panels is, or mixing oil paints on a glass pallette.

Poem Five: Want/Plenty

2005-12-28T20:27:00.000Z

Poem Five: Want/Plenty

2005-12-28T20:17:00.000Z

Crappy photograph of part of the original document in the National Archives. Reproduced here with permission as part of the project. The P's are written more darkly and with more care, for some strange reason that I don't want to ponder too deeply.

Poem Four: No Bestseller/Zaden Bestseller

2005-12-28T20:10:00.000Z

There are more posts about this installation towards the end of the blog. This poem's bilingual, in English and Polish, a language being spoken more and more in Ireland today due to the huge influx of Poles here since EU enlargement last year. It's also a language inextricably connected to the reinvigoration of poetry in the twentieth century. I'm holding a line that translates to "when I am dead." Fun!

Poem Three: Dirty Weather

2005-12-28T20:05:00.000Z

Poem Three: Dirty Weather

2005-12-28T20:00:00.000Z

The rain had to be dealt with. It comes down the wall and onto the stairs. When it hits the stairs, the poem reads, DIRTY WEATHER SHOCKIN!

Poem Three: Dirty Weather

2005-12-28T19:58:00.000Z

Poem Three: Dirty Weather

2005-12-28T19:53:00.000Z

"Rain" falling down the wall from the windows high above the staircase.

Poem Two: The Cleaheen Road

2005-12-28T19:39:00.000Z

Comments from the Dock's Visitors' Book. One end of the Cleaheen Road is in County Roscommon and the other in County Leitrim.

Poem Two: The Cleaheen Road

2005-12-28T19:34:00.000Z

The second poem in the series begins high up on the lime plaster wall above the staircase. It's about a road that links Carrick-on-Shannon to Cootehall, the village I live in. It's a narrow, windy road that follows the Boyle River as it moves into the Shannon. A beautiful road, the one that I rode my bicycle on years ago, and convinced me to move here. The edge of the poem mimics the road.

Poem One: Make Good

2005-12-28T18:37:00.000Z

The first poem in this series coincided with the opening of the Dock. The building was originally the courthouse for the district of Carrick-on-Shannon and, since it was long the seat of the administration of colonial rule of law, it was not a bulding the local people warmed to. The Courthouse sits next to the old gaol buildings (now the County Council offices), and there is an underground tunnel connecting the two sites that was used to lead prisoners to and from the courtrooms. A dank, damp tunnel (photo is taken inside tunnel with grate newly added above it). The scaffold from which prisoners sentenced to death were hung is still affixed to the exterior of the old gaol building.

Since I've lived in the area, the Courthouse has been just a forbidding mass of hoarding as it was disused since 1994 and in bad structural shape. I made a number of visits to the site as it was being renovated (it's a really first-class, sensitive restoration/transformation overseen by Anne Fletcher from Coady Partnership, architects in Dublin) and found the seed for the first poem in the notes that Anne had made for the construction drawings. Then I ran into my neighbor in front of the building one morning, and he gave me the poem's first line verbatim. The photo here gives the entire text of the poem in its un-installed state. I'll type the poem in below too, as it might be hard to read from the photo, depending on your screen size. The text editing in Blogger doesn't do strikethroughs, which is what should be seen in the words "concrete slab" in line 13 below. The architects originally planned to completely cover over the prisoner tunnel. Then they changed their minds and covered in with a steel grate, so you can still look down into it and just imagine.

One Make Good

Séan said, No, I never had reason
to go into THAT place, Thanks be to God.
He cocked a calloused thumb
at the mass of scaffold
(dread word!) and blue hoarding--
Carrick-on-Shannon courthouse
where a poem is constructing
itself in the architects' general notes:

Match original lime harling render.
All existing to be made good.
Keep, salvage, strip, paint, repair.
Enclose tunnel access for prisoners to old
Gaol with concrete slab steel grate.
Overhaul, take down, cart away, keep level.
Open up. Hack off. Rake out. Reinstate.
Drains to be back-filled with river gravel.

Poem One: Make Good

2005-12-28T18:22:00.000Z

Detail of the poem installed on the staircase.

Poem One: Make Good

2005-12-28T18:16:00.000Z

People sit and pass the time on stairs, not in escalators or elevators.

Poem Four: More Photos

2005-12-27T20:54:00.000Z

The photo in the previous post shows a general aspect of the staircase. The one alongside this photo show the text of the poem in better detail.
The Polish translation and the English text alternate line by line.

Staircase Poetry Project

2005-11-30T11:52:00.000Z

Poem Four

No Bestseller/Zaden Bestseller

Poem Four (November 25 to December 8) is bilingual--it's presented in English and another language heard more and more in Ireland today: Polish. To do this, I collaborated with Justyn Hunia who is a poet, translator and musician living in Krakow. Justyn translated my poem and also had the vinyl lettering for the staircase signs printed in Krakow. Why? To get the diacritical marks in Polish right. Justyn and I have worked together before translating a poem by Wislawa Szymborska.
In the very near future, I'll post some information on Poems One, Two and Three. Just getting this site up and running now!