LONG TIME, NO POST

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

I have a new website www.alicelyons.ie

Viewfinder, a sited poem in the Barracks, Cootehall

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

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

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)

"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

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

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