Northern Ireland's disproportionate contribution to the world

In the realm of literature, sport, science, academia, governance and the military, Northern Ireland's contribution to the world has been immense. For a population of 1.8 million it's achievements have been remarkably disproportionate.

American David Remnick recognised this, especially in the field of poetry. The editor of the New Yorker wrote in 1994:

Live Drawing at Arcadia Deli (@ArcadiaDeli), Belfast

Drawing Irish writer and thinker Colm Dore (@ColmDore) at Arcadia Deli

I spent the last Saturday of August 2014 drawing at Arcadia Delicatessan on the Lisburn Road, Belfast. With me being a regular this was a great way to interact with the staff and also meet some of the other customers, and of course draw them. I was operating on a donation system and started quickly. It was the usual Saturday bounce with young children smelling of grass and running about in their freshly used rugby and football kits; mums and dads doing their meat shopping and selecting a choice wine for the weekend dinner party.

 

It was great to see Irish poet Michael Longley come shuffling into the shop and accept my offer for a sitting. He was a joy to draw and speak with and you can see a Vine video of the drawing and a good selection of photos below. You can also see a full range of my cartoons of the staff and customers if you click to see more below.

 

This was a great way to lift things for the shop, the customers and the artist, all coming together in a cherry triangle of high spirits. Art, business and shopping - an intoxicating mix!

 

See my Live Drawing blog here, with a post on drawing Michael Longley here and drawing at Arcadia Deli here. Read about how I do Live Drawing from my website here. See a full chronology on all the Live cartoons I've ever drawn on my Flickr page here, and see how I work and think and process ideas on my Live Drawing Tumblr portfolio here.
 

     

Philip Larkin - 'On Being Twenty-six'

As I savour these last few minutes and moments of my 26 years in this society and make it 27, I want to share my cartoon of Philip Larkin and his poem, 'On Being Twenty-six.' In a period of change and challenge and in a time of self-doubt and crippling comparison, Larkin's word are hugely soothing and encouraging. I also want to share this as a shout out for Lyra McKee as she approaches the 26 mark and battles the precarious and uncertain forces of the freelance world. You too Lyra can take strength and guidance from a successful poet who often thought he was useless. Here it is,  Philip Larkin 'On Being Twenty-six':

I feared these present years, 
      The middle twenties, 
When deftness disappears, 
And each event is 
Freighted with a source-encrusting doubt, 
      And turned to drought. 

Philip Larkin in and on Belfast

Philip Larkin by Ralph Steadman

Philip Larkin was appointed sub-librarian at Queen's University Belfast in June 1950, starting in September of that year. He spent five years in Belfast. Leaving in 1955 Larkin for the University of Hull. He said of the context surrounding his move to Belfast in an interview with the Paris Review:

"After finishing my first books, say by 1945, I thought I had come to an end. I couldn’t write another novel, I published nothing. My personal life was rather harassing. Then in 1950 I went to Belfast, and things reawoke somehow. I wrote some poems, and thought, These aren’t bad, and had that little pamphlet XX Poems printed privately. I felt for the first time I was speaking for myself. Thoughts, feelings, language cohered and jumped. They have to do that. Of course they are always lying around in you, but they have to get together."

He also said to the Paris Review:

"The best writing conditions I ever had were in Belfast, when I was working at the University there."

In his 1950 letter to Monica Jones, Larkin described the city and its people 8 weeks after his arrival there:

"A wide and cobble-streeted town, lined with frowning buildings in the late Victorian manner & some indifferent shops. I’m already fed up with anything called Ulster, Northern, Victoria, etc., also with the Irish male face (craggy, drink-flushed, with greasy black curls and a too-tight collar & the Irish female face (plump, bad-teethed, pinkly powdered, with a diamante lizard on the lapel)."

Sean O'Casey - Writing gets harder the more you do it

Irish writer Sean O'Casey and his wife Eileen Reynolds

Sean O'Casey, playwright born in the tenement slums of Dublin, said:

"When I write a new play. When I sit down to try to write a new play, I’ve had the experience of many plays before. Yet that new play that I am going to try to write gives me the same agony, the same trouble, the, same effort, the same Herculean work as the very first play I ever wrote gave to me."

Christopher Hitchens said the same thing:

"I hate to agree with George Will about this… The truth is, yes there is nothing like not writing for making you unhappy and if you have the compulsion then the only problem that you’ll have is, you surrender to this compulsion more and more and, you’ll find [writing] gets harder the more you do it. That seems a shame. It should get easier, it should become more like a facility for example. It becomes more difficult and it becomes more difficult because you are reading more and more work by better and better people and you’ve lost the sheer nerve and the blind solipsism that allowed you to think you could try it when you were young before you had made any proper comparisons. So it gets much more nerve wracking and much more difficult in every way costly for you and no doubt for your readers."

Samuel Beckett on writing more generally said in 1954:

"It’s hard to go on with everything loathed and repudiated as soon as formulated, and in the act of formulation, and before formulation."

Beckett also wrote:

"I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realized that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding."

Poem - "I am a Syrian"

From the misery of a bloody and brutal civil war, new poets, poetry and cultural creations are emerging. As the Syria-Canadian writer Ghada al-Atrash said:

"Today there is literature coming out of Syria that we could have never even dreamed of just a few years ago."

As expatriate Syrian writer Ghias al-Jundi said:

"A lot of poetry and beautiful lyrics are rising up from the ashes in Syria. There is a cultural side to the revolution, and it's brilliant."

As Mohja Kahf said, thanks in part to the Internet and social media platforms, "A new Syrian identity and literary tradition are being formed around the events of the last few years."

Ghias al-Jundi also explained that poetry in Syria is also playing a role of protest:

"[Poetry is] playing a huge role in Syria right now because the lyrics are part of demonstrations. People are singing these verses together in the streets."

A poem by Youssef Bou Yihea, "I am a Syrian":

"My sect is the scent of my homeland, the soil after the rain, and my Syria is my only religion."

Read in full here: http://m.aljazeera.com/story/20139784442125773

Northern Ireland needs a poet

I wish I could find it but I can't. It's happened to us all. You read something that reaches inside you. The sort of words and writing that you could lap up all day. I can't remember when or where I read the article and passage but it went something like this:

"Northern Ireland/Ireland needs a national poet to talk us through this."

People that know me and who read this blog will know of my firm belief in the power of words, satire, humour and irony to pull down and show the futility of the madness enacted on the streets and in politics.

Here's a great observation made in the Irish Times which encapsulates the need for a nationally relevant poet that can sum up the situation in a simple phrase and who can maybe posit some ideas and even a solution. The commenter went by the title JayGee and said in response to an article written by Malachi O'Doherty:

"I have a collection of poetry called "A Rage For Order" (poetry of the Northern Ireland Troubles) published by The Blackstaff Press in 1992, and edited by Frank Ormsby. I found more truth and regret and love and sorrow in its verse than all the rantings of sectarian politicians.  

For me and my own sense of loss and bewilderment it accomplishes more than any 'Truth Commission' ever could and for any one seeking solace in truth I recommend its humane and moving pages."

"[Writing] is Theft" Ctd Thomas Lynch, Yeats, Auden, Heaney, etc.

 

On the death of Seamus Heaney, Michigan-based undertaker and poet Thomas Lynch paid tribute to the Irish poet on BBC Radio 3 with an essay which spoke on the role of combinatorial creativity. He said:

"I stole that thing about a bridge from another poet who read it somewhere or stole it from another one or made it up. It's what we do, rent to own. Borrow, steal, make things up... When Auden got word of Yeats' death he wrote his famous elegy in memory of William Butler Yeats in which he gives his own directive, borrowing the dead man's table manners:

"Earth receive an honored guest

William Yeats is laid to rest,

Let the Irish vessel like emptied of its poetry."

When Brodsky died, too young, too soon in 1996 Heaney borrowed for Audenesque the rhyme and meter that Auden borrowed from Yeats, and Yeats from Blake and Blake from maybe a children's rhyme."