Poetry by the Corrib
After thirty-two years living in Galway city, all of which were involved with writing in one way or another, one has the oddest feeling that one has 'reared' most of the writers who now inhabit it.
There was nothing when I came here first: I typed and stapled a broadsheet of local poetry which I sold from pub to pub and we'd started up a Galway Writers' Workshop. But there was none at all of the mad and maddening ambition-powered 'scene' that has sprung up in the past few years. It's about something else now, scarcely about writing for its own sake. As a city, Galway creates and recreates itself from week to week; so are local poets born from thin air, Ariel-like creatures, one often thinks, who are there and not there at the same time. And there's a fair bit of snake-oil peddling in the poetry world.
Toss a rock over any wall in Galway and you'll hit a poet, though seldom quite hard enough to make him investigate his own work and rethink what he or she is doing. Open-mic sessions allow anyone to parade himself as a poet to an audience. Criticise the process and one is accused of being élitist, which accusation is the last defence of the truly terrified.
Galway, one feels, has a deep sense of cultural inferiority and needs all the literary activity it can get, valid or otherwise. Galway lost the City of Culture title to Cork, then never even attempted the UNESCO City of Literature title, leaving that to Dublin; splits and divisions in the local poetry world were enhanced or, the suspicious say, encouraged. While cities throughout the country try to push themselves as cultural wellsprings, the single greatest opposition to the development of our eight-year-old Western Writers' Centre in Galway originated from Galway City Council's Arts Office!
Meanwhile some literary groups - more properly, gangs - forbade their members or participants to attend events hosted by 'rival' organisations. The city's intense cultural incestuousness was highlighted when a festival of Northern Irish writing (in Irish as well as English) hosted by the Western Writers' Centre turned out to be the worst attended weekend event in history. Clearly no local scribe was interested in the wider literary world. If you're a writer heading for Galway, dress as you would if you were going to Baghdad or Afghanistan. And wear a helmet.
Fred Johnston (b. Belfast, 1951) is a writer and critic, founded Galway's Cúirt festival of literature as a poetry festival in 1986; eight years ago, he initiated the Western Writers' Centre, Ionad Scríbhneoiri Chaitlin Maude, Galway (www.twwc.ie) His most recent publication is 'Northern Lights' (Lapwing Publications, translations of the poems of French poet, Colette Wittorski. He writes and publishes poetry only in French these days. The views expressed here are his own. The Western Writers' centre can be contacted at westernwriters@eircom.net and 087.2178138. The Centre runs the 'Forge at Gort' literature festival which runs this year on March 26th and 27th.
Photo: © Iain Fairweather, Nairn, Scotland.
