PIR 100 Update

[Dáithí]

The final touches are being put to the next issue of Poetry Ireland Review (issue 100).

Paul Muldoon has signed off on the content and the proof reading is nearly finished. There are 52 poets are featured - including Eva Bourke, Harry Clifton, Celia de Fréine, Paul Durcan, Eamon Grennan, Kerry Hardie, Seamus Heaney, Aifric Mac Aodha, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Tom Mathews, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, David Wheatley and Ann Zell. Books reviewed include collections from Philip Gross’s, Paul Durcan and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin.

Donald Teskey was in the office to sign off on the cover today (a detail from Breath 1) too which was interesting!

[Nessao]

Hi there

Just got my issue no. 100 and leafed through curiously, looking for the essay that seemed to be causing a stir at the Poetry Now festival last weekend. I found it with a review of P.I.R. in the first decade of the 21st century.

It strikes me that Maria Johnston must be a very brave woman, having offended half the people she's likely to bump into at any poetry event over the next 12 months.

There was some very unnecessarily cruel comment, I thought, with individual poets spotlighted in a sadistically harsh way ... She spoke about mediocrity a good deal although it appeared that some things were mediocre merely because she said they were. So I'm curious to hear what other forum members have to say.

Hasten to add that I wasn't mentioned one way or t'other, but being beneath the radar is probably even worse than being mentioned, in that context

Sorry if this thread has appeared elsewhere - I just thought I'd post it here.

Nessa

[Desmond Swords]

What has she said, please? I've not read it. But hope to. I bought a book of Salmon essays a year ago, and luckily skimmed through them in Cassidy's before losing them in Donohues, so got to rate the competition.

There's a few like her about, ready to stick the boot in. But that's what people are sensing is gonna be happening more and more in the coming po-biz scene, perhaps, i'm wondering from the general vibe i'm sniffin at the cyberound lamposts in the globish poetry village of Am 'n UK po-biz.

I've noticed it in America especially. More so than the UK - where it's mainly a fumey kinda bore hating yer every plastic fibre in total silence. Very strategic and incredibly ruthless with the competition: 10,000 po-biz pros in America alone. And very cliquey editorially, online. The guys (it is mainly guys) throwing themselves about in Chicago and Boston, can get really ratty and pretty aggressive. The F bomb is a normal unit of verbal etiqutte and critical currency there - a whole different stilleto in the flyte.

[Desmond Swords]

I've read it now, at the link Poetry Ireland put it up at for free viewing here, O'Mahony.

I googled her and cannot find any of her own poems, and gather she's a Dr. teaching AmPo in Trinity and Mater Dei.

What I noticed first is she lays into about seven women before any blokes get it.

The next thing I noted was the critics she approves of. William Logan, a two-dimensional vaudevillian, the Glenn Beck of American poetry criticism.

Joan Houlihan, a woman who writes, what in my opinion is - to use Johnston's term - 'dross' poetry herself, whilst running, what I think of as, rip off $25 entry-fee manuscript competitions that draw 1000 entries, with 'readers' sifting 90% out and ranking the rest so the judges don't have to judge themselves. For an extra few hundred quid you get the special eye cast over your ms, and for a few hundred more get to go on the poetry retreat.

Then she quotes Mark Haddon who, Ranjit Bolt concluded - when reviewing 'the ghastliness of Haddon's verse', in the Observer, 2005 - writes some of the worst poetry going; so bad the reader may wonder if he's taking the Michael, or not, Bolt wondered.

An 'expert' Critic. Just one person's opinions. A woman who can't drive waxing lyrical about how cars work. A person who can't play music telling the piano player where they're going wrong. A person with a void that needs filling, so dishes it out to the sisters. She mocks Bernie O'Reilly for being 'less than second-rate', completely missing the point, that poetry is about embracing everyone at every level, not just about parading the thoroughbreds so she can whet herself over the 'best'. Suck up to those higher in the IrePo-biz foodchain and stick the stilleto into those who are never gonna hit ollamh.

At least she's saying what she thinks.