I love poetry. From the moment an old typewriter appeared on my 15th birthday, I marvelled at the letters on the keyboard, as I pressed each one, and at the imprint that remained afterwards, firm and inky black on a white sheet of paper. Making poems was physical.
Sinking my fingertips one at a time down on each letter of the keyboard was a sensual act, and the instant appearance of the same letter on the page delighted me as much as the shape of a pot might delight the eyes a ceramic artist.
I have an old friend who has beautiful eyes. He lives on the other side of the lake and his life is dedicated to his art. Peter Fulop is a Hungarian artist who works quietly in the Leitrim hills, and often travels to Korea or Japan to learn from great ceramic masters.
His pots, plates and jugs are simple and profound; white, empty vessels with black splurges along the sides like the strokes of a calligrapher’s brush.
His long hair falls either side of his face as he turns the pot, and his joy in the work reminds me of my own early ecstasies when I first formed words physically on an empty page.
But my mentors were not Zen masters in Japan. Mine were poets that nursed their afflictions in the snugs of various Dublin pubs. I was too young to have met Patrick Kavanagh himself, but I shook many hands that shook his.
When I finished my homework in the big study hall in secondary school each night as a teenager, I would take out Kavanagh’s poems and whisper them to myself as I waited for the bell to ring.
Then I’d walk to the bicycle shed, strap on my bicycle clips, hook the lamp onto the front bar and head for home through the dark enveloping woods, with Kavanagh’s voice in my ear.
I could recite his poems as I cycled, and thus I cycled through his world of dandelions and ditches in the dark.
I saw his stoney grey soil where the lamp shone, and when beasts moved behind the ditches and frightened me, I offered my prayers like white roses to the same Virgin Mary as Kavanagh weaved into the end of his Christmas Childhood.
Of course Kavanagh had feet of clay and I can now see him and hear his croaking voice on You Tube, as he rants beneath a soft hat, in short-tempered breath.
But it’s the mythic poet I still believe in, the medieval ghost I still hear when I hear the blackbird sing, calling to me from some invisible realm just beyond the blackthorn bushes.
Winning poems
This year I attended the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Awards Ceremony in Inniskeen.
As I stepped in the door of the hall a young secondary school student called Eileen Casey was reading the opening lines from one of the winning poems. As she stood at the microphone I could hear her breathe each word into the air.
“When I was nine,” she began, “my sister and I found a snake under the veranda, shedding its skin, all jewel tones, and ran back towards the mobile home, through nettles and poison ivy, laughing with fear.”
It was a wonderful poem. It was a wonderful moment. She was reciting her own words in a public place.
Breathing them into life, as if each one was as solid in the air as a ceramic bowl, and full of that emptiness that makes human beings contemplate the universe.
There were other poems by other winners, and I was so swept off my feet that afterwards I wanted to go and tell Kavanagh how beautiful Monaghan can still be, and to reassure him that the medieval world of felt poetry that he once embodied had not died.
I left the building and wandered up the hill into the graveyard, where a solitary old man was mooching around the graves.
“We appear to be alone,” he joked. The day was dry and the autumn sunlight slanted from behind him and cut into my face. I asked him did he know where I might find Kavanagh’s grave.
He was a lanky man in his 70s, but as lively on his feet as a boy.
“This way,” he said, and he marched along the narrow cement path between the sleeping dead until we found the spot. The grave he pointed to was marked by a simple cross at the head bearing the poet’s name.
“Were you in the hall,” the old man inquired, “for the awards?”
“I was,” I said. “I love poetry.”