Last night, Wednesday 26 September 2007, my partner and I attended the weekly White House Poetry event in Limerick. We were treated to an interesting reading of his poetry by Anatoly Kudryavitsky. He read from his first poetry collection Shadow of Time and then treated us to some wonderful haiku from his second collection Morning at Mount Ring published in July of this year. Anatoly also played a selection of Tibetan and Nepalese instruments (bells, wind chimes and singing bowls) which was a real treat. He used the singing bowl and bells to great effect in his haiku reading.

As always, the guest reader was preceded by a number of other poets who took advantage of the Open Mike session. I performed two poems on this occasion as follows:

• Ordeal
• Facets

I had planned to do some haiku also, but decided to stop after Facets, as I suffered a nerve-racking memory lapse in the middle of Facets which threw me a bit. That is the danger of performing rather than reading poetry from a book or manuscript. Personally though, I feel obliged to always perform if at all possible and dispense with the written word.

A poem deserves complete attention both from the audience and the “reader”. The best way for me to give the poem its due is to perform it from memory. The danger implicit in doing this gives the performance an extra edge and bite - the poem sings itself through the poet when performed properly, and the audience is enrapt.

With less than an hour to go to the kick-off of the crunch group D Rugby World Cup match between Ireland and France in Paris, my heart tells me that Ireland will storm to an historic win, but my head tells me otherwise.

Specifically, I have serious concerns about the colour of the Ireland away strip, which is grey! Grey! Who is the idiot that decided on that colour? Grey is not a suitable colour for playing an agressive sport like Rugby, or indeed for playing any competitive sport. My wife, who is a colour analyst, tells me that grey is a relaxing colour and good for when you want to boost mental activity, but no way is it suitable for playing a competitive team sport.

Manchester United used grey as their away strip some years ago and suffered a disastrous run of results while wearing the strip. As soon as they changed from grey, they got back on winning ways.

The bad form shown by this excellent Irish team could well be due to choosing the wrong colour for their strip. I’m praying that this is not the case, but if Ireland lose tonight, I think the blame should be bourne by whoever is/are the dimwit/s who decided on grey as the colour.

I finally took up Barnie Sheehan’s invitation to ‘read’ at the weekly Whitehouse Poets event (I’m slide no 5) in Limerick last Wednesday night, 5th August 2007. There were a lot of other poets doing their stuff too - 10 in all I think. I ‘read’ fifth in line. When I say ‘read’ I really mean recited (though I’m not entirely comfortable with this word either) hence the single quotes. It was the first time I used a microphone and I found it quite off-putting as my voice sounded distant and disembodied, and I had little idea of what it actually sounded like to anybody else. In any case, I ‘read’ three poems in the following order - Dog Burial, Samhain, and Resurrection. All went well until I forgot the 1st line of the second verse in Resurrection and had to start again. This interrupted the flow of the poem and I botched a couple of other lines also and ended up having to refer to my sheaf of paper which I always have on hand as comfort. Very annoying! In any case I’m glad to have done it, and will do it again soon.

I found it very interesting and stimulating to hear the other poets read some of their stuff. The variety was amazing.

The main event was a reading by Catherine Ann Cullen from her first collection entitled A Bone in My Throat. I really liked her poetry, and especially liked the last two poems she did, which will form part of her next collection. I purchased a copy of her collection which she autographed. You can see the reading on YouTube for yourself. Before beginning her reading she remarked that performance poets made her uneasy and nervous as she could never recite her poetry from memory. I took the remark to refer to me, since I was the only one on the night to do without recourse to the written word.

A couple of days ago (or was it yesterday?), the Food Safety Authority of Ireland issued a warning to parents about the dangers of certain artificial colourants added to some foods and soft drinks - you can read the detail on the FSAI’s website.

While it comes as no surprise to me that these additives are dangerous (even though that’s not the word used by either the Irish or British FSA, for legal reasons it is to be presumed), it never ceases to amaze me how people in general, and parents of young children in particular, never look at the list of ingredients in the stuff they buy for themselves and their children. Surely not to look at the ingredients is serious enough to be considered a dereliction of parental duty! It is in my book!

The additives in question are Tartrazine (E102), Ponceau 4R (E124), Sunset Yellow (E110), Carmoisine (E122), Quinoline Yellow (D104), and Allura Red (E129). At least some of them are members of the so-called Azo Dyes, which I have written about in an earlier post.
This notice coming hot on the heels of the banning of E128 (Red 2G) shows that the Food Safety Authorities in these islands are doing their job. It is now incumbent upon parents to start doing theirs.

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.