Archives for June 2010

Around about now in Dublin the Taoiseach is announcing the Ireland Professor of Poetry 2010. It's a pretty significant post which is held for three years. There have been 4 already, John Montague, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Paul Durcan and the outgoing one is Michael Longley.

The 5th is the poet Harry Clifton. He's maybe not an instantly recognisable name. We had a sweepstake in the office. Names like Paul Muldoon, Dennis O'Driscoll and Eavan Boland were bandied about, but not Harry Clifton.

Born in Dublin in 1952, he has spent much of his writing life living outside of Ireland. In the 1970's Nigeria, and later Thailand. Then Italy, Switzerland, Germany, England and Paris for ten years. He returned to Ireland in 2004.

He's aware that his time away from Ireland put him outside the mainstream of Irish poets. A poetry collection about Paris and a memoir on his time in Italy maybe didn't plug him into the circuit as much.

When we spoke earlier today, he was the first to bring this point up. He believes that getting this pretty major post signals a broadening of Irish poetry.

And on a more practical note, in these recession ridden times, he very honestly admitted he now has a job for the next 3 years.

Listen here for my interview with Harry Clifton on Arts Extra tonight at half past six.

Daphne Todd's painting "Last Portrait of Mother" has just won the BP Portrait Award. 

There's been a mixed reaction to this painting. It only struck me as I was talking to Daphne earlier that seeing a dead body isn't the cultural norm for many people.

But here in Ireland we make an art form of it.

The Irish Wake is a cultural phenomenon. The deceased comes back to the house, takes up centre stage, there's tea, sandwiches, sometimes alcohol, there used to be plates of cigarettes passed around, there are stories and prayers. It's a social occasion. 

Daphne says she had a very understanding undertaker who let her sit with her dead mother. For three days after she died, Daphne sat and painted her. In a funny way she said it became social too.

She could hear the stone masons in another room whistling while they carved headstones. The undertakers would put her name in the pot for the tea break. But she couldn't bring herself to drink her tea and eat her kit-kat in front of her mother and would leave the room.

Mirrors in a wake house are usually covered or their faces turned to the wall. 

With "Last Portrait of Mother", Daphne Todd uncovers the mirror, and reflects her dead mother back to the viewer. In doing so she's breaking one of the last Western cultural taboos - staring into the face of death.

On saturday night I went to Lisburn's Island Arts Centre to hear new writing by 5 local playwrights, Richard Dormer, Martin Lynch, Rosemary Jenkinson, Stacey Gregg and David Ireland. 

The pieces were all about 10 minutes long, and were on the theme "Come to where I'm from". Its part of a UK wide project created by the English touring new writing company Paines Plough. Their only visit to Northern Ireland was hosted by Ransom Theatre Productions.

What made this new writing event a bit different was the writers had to read the material themselves. And they were nervous. Even the professional actors among them, Richard Dormer and David Ireland (who later confessed to me that he was the most nervous he has ever been).

I was asked to contribute to a feedback form afterwards. I started out using words like "enjoyable" "thought provoking" and then, as I warmed to the theme, at the same time the space ran out on the piece of paper, I realised that there was something else much more critical to new Northern Irish writing that had impressed me. Here was contemporary writing, and when I say contemporary I mean written in the last 2 to 3 weeks, that didn't seek to fall back on the old stereotypical "Troubles" voice.

It was hard hitting. David Ireland talking about his mixed reaction, as a Protestant from East Belfast, to the recent scenes of jubilation in Guildhall Square the day the Saville Report was published. 

It was funny and poignant. Stacey Gregg, wearing an "I Heart Belfast" tee-shirt, chose to make "home" an ex lover who she keeps going back to again and again and who starts seeing someone else more trendy when she's away living in England.

It was dry and understated. Rosemary Jenkinson, for whom home is also East Belfast, wryly noted that she had travelled to broaden her horizons, a spell teaching in Poland and Russia, only to come back home and Polish and Russian people have moved into her street.

Disturbing and divided. Richard Dormer remembered a night when he was 14 years old. A Lisburn Protestant, he had stood beside a Catholic friend as a mob of nearly 50 young men came to beat up his friend for getting a Protestant girl pregnant.But, in something out of a movie, as the crowd loomed closer, the scene was paused by the pregnant girl appearing out of nowhere and standing between them and the crowd.

And Martin Lynch introduced us to a neighbour of his from the docks area of Belfast, Mrs Baker, whose straight talking thoughts on everyone from Ian Paisley to Gerry Adams to Barack Obama can't be written down here. 

Here's hoping the work gets a stage again.

So am sitting in studio 8 of BBC, Broadcasting House, Belfast watching the clock. It's 5 to 8 and just after the 8 o'clock news I will present my last "Sounds Classical". I've been doing this show for over 4 years now. But about 2 months ago I realised that I had to make a decision. Working weekends, as well as during the week on "Arts Extra", 2 small children, family life, etc etc....something had to give. And reluctantly it is this show.

So I made the decision to quit, told my boss and gave him today's date as my last show.

As I left the house tonight I said to the two girls "I'm away, last show on a sunday night...mummy will be here now on sunday nights", expecting a warm rush of cheer. Instead they looked miserable.

And then I saw why, on the tv, there she was, in her glass coffin, the dwarves crying, the woodland animals crying. Snow White. Dead. 

At least I knew that the next frame would bring Prince Charming riding into view, and, with a kiss, bring her back to life and give my two girls their happy ever after.

And bitter sweet happy endings here too. Am not sure how I will be at the end of the show tonight at 10, especially with the last piece of music. It's my all time favourite, the intermezzo from Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana. A piece I first heard before I was even born. My mum was in a production of it in Birmingham when she was eight months pregnant with me! So there is something about babies and the womb and classical music, because it always hits the spot. It's only right that it's the last piece of music for me tonight. Oh and for the next 7 days if you fancy listening again on the bbc iplayer!

I seem to be all things Seamus Heaney at the mo. Note last blog. But had to blog about his much awaited new collection "Human Chain" which is out on the 2nd of September published by Faber. I've had a sneak preview of a few of the new poems. 

One called "Miracle" deals with the aftermath of his stroke in 2007. He writes about being lifted up onto a stretcher by two Donegal ambulance men, and likens it to the Bible story of the crippled man whose friends, trying to get him close to Jesus on a healing visit to Capernaum, raise up him onto the roof of the house, then remove the tiles in order to lower him down through the hole.

In the same poem he expresses his love for his wife Marie as she holds his hand in the back of the same ambulance as it drives him to Letterkenny Hospital.

Another, one of my new Heaney favourites, is called "In the Attic". The attic is in his house, where he does all his writing. In the poem he is climbing the stairs towards it. In a twist on his famous "Follower" poem, he is now the older man. 

"As I age and blank on names/As my uncertainty on stairs/Is more and more the lightheadness of a cabin boy's first time on the rigging".

He is far from uncertain or lightheaded. I can't wait to read more from "Human Chain", and meet him when he's here in Belfast. He's booked to appear at the Feile an Phobail in West Belfast in August and Aspects Literature Festival in Bangor in September.

I also had a strange dream about him the other night which involved me interviewing him and catching sight of, under the legs of his suit trousers, a shiny bright red pair of doc martens. I had taken cold medication before going to bed so attribute the surreal nature of the dream to that.

However, when I see him, I will have to find out if he has, at any point in his life, ever owned a pair of red DMs!

The team leading the Derry~Londonderry bid to be UK City of Culture 2013 made their final presentation earlier today. At 930 this morning in Liverpool, the team got 20 mins to lay out their stall and then were grilled for over an hour and half by the judging panel, led by Phil Redmond. According to the people in the room it was "robust" and concentrated on key themes of "community and leadership".

Among the bid team, the Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness. In his speech to the judges he spoke about the last few days in Derry in the wake of the Saville Report. I spoke to him after and asked why he felt he had to raise this? 

He said the impetus to talk about it had come from comments made to him from the moment he arrived in Liverpool, at both a public reception last night hosted by the Mayor of Liverpool for all 4 bidding cities and even before they started their presentation this morning. Many of them said they were really struck by the images they had seen on the tv on Tuesday. Declan Kelly the US Economic Envoy to Northern Ireland with the United States government was also in the room. He talked about how the scenes from the Guildhall Square were front page news in the New York Times.

But isn't there a worry I asked Martin McGuinness that this could go against the city? When you have the Prime Minister David Cameron apologising for Bloody Sunday, it could be said that Derry has had its moment in the sun and this global publicity could go against the bid. He didn't agree, saying one was the past, the bid was looking forward to a better future.

He's also a Derry man so he would say that! But the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg is also a Sheffield man. Could this go in Sheffield's favour? According to Martin McGuinness, every time he has met David Cameron, the PM ends their meetings saying good luck for the bid. Mmmmm. Political machinations! I wonder does he say the same to Nick?

As the 16th June looms, I still haven't opened the copy I own. But at our planning meeting earlier there must have been a rush of blood to the head as we decided that I would, along with Noel (my producer) and Grainne (one of the production team) start tonight, read Chapter 1 and see how we feel tomorrow! 

Noel has a head start as he has already read it, I have bluffed my way through at least 6 Bloomsdays now and Grainne says she has tried to start it at least 3 times and once lived in a house where everyone owned a copy but nobody had ever read it!

Noel reckons that we could get it finished within the month. Just in time for Bloomsday 2011!

This was a first for me today. Learning to play the lambeg drum. John our sound engineer took this photo on his phone while I was being given a go.

Don't know how those fellas do it as I had to get one of them, Jonathan, to hold it up for me. Am a lightweight.

This lambeg drum is being launched tomorrow. Lagan Village drumming school is unveiling and naming it in memory of Thomas Andrews the designer of the Titanic.

Old Pump house tomorrow in the Titantic Quarter at 11am.

Wonderful moment with Joan Lingard on Friday when I was recording with her for the BBC Radio Ulster doc "Kevin & Sadie". She's holding the original handwritten manuscript for her first Kevin & Sadie book "The Twelfth Day of July" which she wrote in 1969.

Joan has gifted all her manuscripts to the Linenhall Library where they are currently on show for the first time.

She was tickled pink she had to wear white gloves to touch her own work.

(pic courtesy of neilharrisonphotography.com)

You can hear my conversation with her, including a very emotional visit to her old house in Holland Gardens, East Belfast, the first time she had been back inside her childhood home in over 60 years, on Sunday 11th July at 1.30pm BBC Radio Ulster.

The great Irish landscape painter Terence P Flanagan when he received an hononary degree of Doctor of Fine Arts (DFA) from the University of Ulster at the end of last week.

He had said to me the day before that he was nervous about the occasion. Being in the spotlight. But doesn't he look proud?

He got the title surrounded by family and friends, including his greatest fan his much loved wife Sheila, but also surrounded by many of his early works which are on show in the Ormeau Baths Gallery as part of a selected exhibition "Correspondences".

And there will be more from Dr. Flanagan in the late summer. The FE McWIlliam Gallery outside Banbridge will host new work in August, which TP said he was going to concentrate on when all the fuss had died down!

Julia MacRae may not be a household name but, 40 years ago, when she was working for the book publishers Penguin, a writer friend passed on a manuscript for her to read. It was by a young Belfast born writer called Joan Lingard who was feeling a bit fed up after her novel had been given the run around by other publishers. The novel she was looking at was called "The Twelfth Day of July", the beginning of the Kevin and Sadie love story. 

Before Julia read it other publishers had rejected it. It was 1970 and something written about the Troubles was, according to Julia", "not only controversial"...it wouldn't sell".

She says she just saw a great story. Forty years later the book she published and the 4 subsequent ones have never been out of print. She knew her stuff.

Joan Lingard's Kevin and Sadie books turn 40 this year and Joan is coming back to Belfast to mark it with a doc I'm fronting for BBC Radio Ulster. The first book in the series "The Twelfth Day of July" introduced us to Kevin McCoy and Sadie Jackson, a Romeo & Juliet/West Side Story for Belfast in the Troubles. So I''ve been re- reading them seeing as the last time I read them was *cough* circa 1979.

To my joy, the two I've read so far "The Twelfth Day of July" and "Across the Barricades" still have the raw power of that first read. The illicit thrill of that divided love, the violence, sectarian hatred, the struggle to understand each other and then the reality of having to move away in order to live a better life. Kevin says to Sadie towards the end of the second book "Across the Barricades", "I don't like the way we've got to live. It's not living anymore. Not living the way I want it". And so he decides to go away, thus setting the scene for the third book "Into Exile". If I'm honest, I do remember getting a bit jaded by the end of "A Proper Place", the 4th book. Maybe I had just grown out of them, and Kevin McCoy, now a married man with child, didn't grab me as much as the young, dark eyed, dark haired teenage Kevin I had first read about. Instead I was fancying the guys in Smash Hits and Look In!

"Across the Barricades" is still taught in some schools here. The year 10 pupils reading it were born around 1997, a year before the Good Friday Agreement. Kevin & Sadie's Belfast must seem almost pre historic.

"Kevin and Sadie" goes out on BBC Radio Ulster on Sunday the 11th July at 1.30pm 

I saw photographs today that genuinely made me cry. Images like this one. He's a young homeless Lithuanian man on the streets of Belfast. It's the way he looks straight at the camera, his eyes kind of defying you to dare look away. The black bruise under his eye tells another story. It's magnetic. 

His wife's picture hangs on the wall next to him. She looks so much older than her years. Her head is in her hands.

"Looking in" is a new exhibition of works by Belfast photographer Donal McCann, commissioned by the Welcome Organisation, a local charity which offers basic needs food, showers, laundry and a daytime drop in centre for homeless people.

They describe the photos as "showing the human face of homelessness". For me, I was being asked to look into the eyes of a person I probably walk past every day. 

This exhibition needs to be seen by a much wider audience. Let's hope that it gets the chance to tour other venues in Belfast and further afield.

 It's at the Waterfront Hall from today until the 29th June.