Clare Three-Legged Stool Poets are delighted to announce a new monthly poetry event in conjunction with Glór in Ennis. It will be held on the third Saturday of every month in the Atrium in Glór from 2.30pm to 4.30pm commencing on 15th November 2008. There is no entrance fee.
Each month will see a guest poet read from their work. This will be followed by readings of new poems by members of Clare Three Legged Stool Poets and others who want to introduce their work. The poetry will be interspersed with live music of a classical, traditional or jazz nature performed by local musicians. Please come along to listen or to read - you will be most welcome!
November’s guest poet is Fred Johnston, while December’s guest poet is Frank Golden .

The Three Legged Stool Poets was founded in 2003 to celebrate the poetic work of men and women in Clare, and counts the following poets among its members:

• Brian Mooney
• Arthur Watson
• Rob Hopkins
• Padraig Haugh
• Claire Hughes
• Murdoch Lothian
• John Doorty
• Frank Golden
• Geraldine Hetherton
• Patrick Stack
• Michelle Bradley
• Ilsa Thielan
• Michael Reeves
• Larry O’Bryan
• Noel Mulqueen
• Paul Saalbach

I did three readings at this year’s Summer Music on the Shannon which I am only now getting round to documenting. SMS 2008 proved highly successful with a record 17 concerts in 3 weeks and a plethora of very talented musicians and performers from around the globe, including the one and only Carl Davis.

I performed the following poems at the Georgian House on Tuesday 5th August 2008 in order: Embrace, The Parting,  “As deer move through the forest“, Full Moon over America and Resurrection. The audience was small but appreciative.

As part of the programme for the Mozart and Wine fundraiser at the Georgian House on Monday 11th August 2008 the following were performed in order: Full Moon over America, Embrace, and Samhain. I finished up with a poetry-jazz fusion of Tricolour with John Beder on percussion, Fabio de Oliveira on trumpet and Conor MacCarthy on double bass. We’d only done a 10 minute rehearsal that evening in the concert hall but it really worked and went down a treat. Unfortunately it wasn’t possible to get a recording - I tried to make it happen after but it wasn’t meant to be.

As part of the daily Informal Concert series organized by Adele O’Dwyer in the Jean Monet Theatre in UL, I performed Embrace accompanied by Tim Hurtz oboist extraordinaire on Wednesday 13th August 2008. A person in the audience recorded it on camcorder and has promised to send it on. I’ll post it here when I get it.

This Friday evening sees a benefit concert in The Friary, Ennis at 8pm sharp. Taking part are Clare Music Makers’ Senior Orchestra and Ennis Brass Band. Come along for a great evening’s music and at the same time help a good cause (Clare Haven).

I’m glad to report that this year’s Clare Music Makers’ Christmas Concert, which was postponed due to flooding, has been rescheduled for Sunday January 13th 2008 at the same venue, i.e. St. Flannan’s Hall, Ennis.

I’ll post more details here when I have them.

When I arrived this morning at St. Flannan’s Hall for rehearsal for this afternoon’s CMM Christmas Concert, I was disappointed to find that the concert had been postponed until after Christmas due to flooding from the very heavy rain and high winds we’ve been having for the last few days. Bummer!

I’m sure everybody else is just as disappointed that we didn’t get to play after all. Even though the concert will go ahead after Christmas (apparently) it won’t be the same as Christmas will be over, and playing the carols adds to the enjoyment of the whole thing.

Oh well! Here’s hoping for a good one anyway.

I’m really looking forward to playing in the Clare Music Makers’ Christmas Concert tomorrow afternoon at 3.00pm in St. Flannan’s Hall, Ennis.

I’m playing in the Senior Orchestra as well as accompanying the choir. We’ll be performing some Handel as well as a range of Christmas Carols.

I’m currently feeling like sh1t with this nasty little virus that has invaded my sinuses and knocked out my finely-tuned thinking processes so essential to programming. So I’ve taken a couple of days off from work - no point in fighting for a lost cause, or indeed in spreading the virus further.

Right now I’m seated in our healing room typing this on the Powerbook G4 while I listen to Coil’s Scatology as it is transferred from cassette tape to mp3 format via the Tape2PC usb tape deck and the XP laptop. I must say the lyrics admirably (I used the word advisedly!) reflect my mood and how I am feeling. “See the black sun rise in the solar lodge” (from Solar Lodge) repeated over and over to cacaphonous drums and guitars does the trick. And the track titles themselves lend to the ambience:

1. Ubu Noir
2. Panic
3. At the heart of it all
4. Tenderness of Wolves
5. The spoiler
6. The clap
7. Solar Lodge
8. The sewage worker’s birthday party
9. Godhead - Deathead
10. Cathedral in Flames

Some of the lyrics in Ubu Noir sound suspiciously like the Klingon “dach mach teach” as uttered by the Klingon captain in the banquet scene on board the Starship Enterprise in The Undiscovered Country.

I’ve been so busy recently that I haven’t had a chance to report on my 2nd poetry performance, which I mentioned in a previous post. This was part of the Mozart & Wine evening held as a Summer Music on the Shannon fundraiser at The Georgian House in Pery Square, Limerick on Monday 13th August last. Here is what the ticket looked like:

Unfortunately I don’t have the exact running order for the evening, but I can say with certaintly that the evening commenced at 8.00 pm instead 7.30 pm as advertised due to the number of late comers. The evening began with the wonderful Mozart Quintet in C minor, with Timothy Hurtz on oboe. I don’t remember who the other 4 musicians were (I think Sharon Nye was on Cello). The wine-tasting took place after that. And then there was an short interval, which I took advantage of by disappering upstairs to the “green room”. Toni Rose (piano) and Sarah-Ellen Murphy (soprano) soon joined me as they were on after me. I must say I was very nervous and getting more so by the minute. So, I chatted with Toni and Sarah-Ellen in an effort to relax a bit, and then paced up and down the adacent room breathing deeply all the while, which allowed me to get into the right frame of mind for my performance.

Once everybody was back in their seats after the wine-tasting, I was announced and on I went. This time I decided to vary the order of the poems by starting with the mood piece Samhain which I thought would be a gentle introduction given the audience had been sipping wine for the previous 30 minutes or so. I also did 2 additional poems, the order being as follows:

1. Samhain
2. Resurrection
3. ‘Oh’
4. ‘As deer move through the forest’
5. Septet

As at the previous performance, I got great applause and was about to walk off when a man in the audience, who later turned out to be Barney Sheehan of Whitehouse Poetry fame, asked me to do an encore. So I did Embrace, which is my most recent composition.

I was shaking after the event for some time as a result of the nerves and excitement, but I was very happy that I had done the material justice. I wasn’t in any state to stay and listen to Sarah-Ellen Murphy’s wonderful singing accompanied by Toni Rose on piano. Instead I repaired post haste to the Coach House where the wine-tasting had been held for a glass of white wine to quench my raging thirst. When I returned Mark Ashmore, Elinor Moran, and Trevor Selby were doing their Opera excerpts to great applause and laughter.
Afterwards, Barnie Sheehan asked me to come and read at the Whitehouse, and I promised I would.

As an addendum to the above, I ran off a(n extremely) limited edition of 4 (four) copies of the poems performed on the night under the title Mozart & Wine Poetry Reading. Each poem is individually autographed, and all 6 poems are in the order in which they were performed.

It’s a sad day for the Opera world with the news of the death of that wonderful tenor Luciano Pavarotti earlier this morning.

I’m not by any means an Opera fan - it’s an acquired taste that I have yet to acquire - but Pavarotti was something special. My abiding memory of him was in the 1980s when visiting my parents. I was walking through the kitchen en route to somewhere else in the house. The TV was on in the corner, and this amazing voice was issuing forth from it. So much so that I stopped dead in my tracks, and asked my mother in wonder “Who is that?” to be told that it was Luciano Pavarotti.

RTVE (Radio Televisión Española) is offering a free download of Bruce Stringsteen’s new single Radio Nowhere only until next Tuesday 4th September 2007 (I think). You can download it from this address www.rtve.es/bruce/ in MP3 format (4.5Mb). For those of you who don’t read Spanish, click on the green AQUI on the right hand side of the page.