What do other people think of Patrick Kavanagh? We asked a selection of writers for their opinions, including winners of the Patrick Kavanagh Award.
First given in 1971, to Sean Clarkin, it is awarded for a collection by an as-yet-unpublished poet. This year's winner will be announced at the annual Patrick Kavanagh Weekend, in Inniskeen, Co Monaghan, which takes place from November 26th to 28th.
Terence Brown, Professor of Anglo-Irish literature Trinity College, Dublin
"I've been teaching Kavanagh since 1968, and he's still very popular with students. There is still a sense of his work touching the quick of Irish society, despite all the changes and the fact that we are no longer a rural society but predominantly urban and suburban. The reaction to his work has changed over time. In the 1970s many would have recognised precisely the world of the The Great Hunger: the repression, the isolation. This would have been the rural world many of the students would have come from. They could identify with it. Now it seems like a vanished age to today's students. The notion that the police were interested briefly in the author of The Great Hunger, because of the references to masturbation, seems inconceivable to them now. I think many young people are at a stage in university where they're opening up to exploring the spiritual. Kavanagh's late poems are very mystic and are relevant today, especially when people are looking for alternative ways of exploring spirituality."
Niall MacMonagle, English teacher, Wesley College, Dublin
"Kavanagh is, and always has been, incredibly popular in the classroom. Only once did I have a girl who dismissed him as a bog poet. I still remember her name. Kavanagh knows about loneliness and about being an outsider. Adolescents identify with that, and they respond so well to those feelings. The Ireland we live in now has changed hugely from when I began teaching Kavanagh. It is secular and materialistic: the weekend begins on a Tuesday now for teenagers. The oppression of The Great Hunger, the sense of guilt and sexual repression - adolescents can't identify with that at all. That Ireland is behind them. I don't think there's a Paddy Maguire out there now: that repressed, closed-down life. In a way Kavanagh is an antidote to crass materialism. If you look at the poem Advent you could read it as being about the need to detox, to be crude about it: about becoming pure and beginning all over again. He is a combination of confidence and humility, and adolescents respond to that, both boys and girls."
Peter Sirr,1982 winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Award; former director of the Irish Writers' Centre
"What I like about Kavanagh is that he's an extremely uncomfortable poet. He's grimy. There is a gruff innocence about the work, his love affair with the ordinariness of things. But he's not someone I would have been particularly preoccupied with. He's easy to overlook, and I would have taken him a bit for granted. What I like about his work is his independence of spirit. My favourite poems are The Hospital and If Ever You Go To Dublin Town. I don't know why he's not so well known outside Ireland. Reputations are funny things: they don't always travel. I do think his star has waned in the minds of a younger generation of poets, and I do think he is still relevant. He always followed the courage of his convictions and didn't suck up to any establishments."
Sinéad Morrissey, 1990 winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Award
"I don't read Kavanagh any more, although Epic remains a favourite poem. At the time I won the prize I did read him. Now I'm reading more American and Australian poets: I've moved on to looking at other voices. I don't know anything about rural Ireland; I've never lived there. But Ireland is still very agricultural. I think Kavanagh laid the foundations for a certain kind of realistic rural poetry that was helpful to Heaney. Since then Kavanagh has been overshadowed by Heaney's success. Kavanagh is that figure standing behind in the shadow rather than the figure in the limelight. But I think the centenary means Kavanagh's star is ascending."
Conor O'Callaghan, 1993 winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Award
"Kavanagh was the first poet I'd ever heard of. Inniskeen is about four miles from my family home. It was very important for me as a young poet to read a poem like Prelude and recognise that some of the rhyming is underpinned by an accent very close to the one we used in Dundalk. I really like I Had A Future: he finds a gorgeous midway point between hope and disappointment. I love The Hospital as well. I think Kavanagh remains one of the best Irish poets and certainly the most influential. Clearly, the whole oeuvre is profoundly uneven, but I think that's the fate of most authentically original poets. The whole business of consistency is greatly overemphasised in poetry. Hollandaise sauces should be consistent, but poetry? For want of a better term, I think Kavanagh strove for something visionary and was prepared to fail, and fail repeatedly, on the way. Also, he was one of the very first Irish poets to show the simplified idealisation of rural experience that the Celtic Revival subsidised for the hooey that it was."
Celia de Fréine, 1994 winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Award
"Kavanagh was a great poet in his day. He led the reaction to Yeats's romanticism. He's unlikely ever not to be relevant: he writes about love, frustration, deprivation. He was a very no-frills poet. He wrote about things as they were. My favourite poem would be Epic. But the places he writes about are gone: the Monaghan of the 1950s is a bygone time; it was a bleak, miserable place. I think with poetry there is the work and then there is the promotion of the poet. Kavanagh never got that promotion abroad, but this year, with the centenary, his profile is rising. Abroad, Yeats was very glamorous - all the stuff about Maud Gonne and love. Kavanagh's work is not very glamorous, very connected to the soil."
William Wall, 1995 winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Award
"I think Kavanagh's star is probably fading out a bit. Ireland is leaving him behind. It takes an effort to read him, because you have to reclaim him, reclaim the world he is writing about. He is archaeological. I don't think a lot of young people would understand him. Kavanagh's Monaghan is like Frank O'Connor's Cork: we live in a different world now. There are a lot of Kavanagh's poems I wouldn't bother rereading. The one I like best is Epic. But I think The Great Hunger is still relevant to today's Ireland. We are still a hungry society. We have a spiritual hunger."
Joseph Woods, 2000 winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Award; director of Poetry Ireland
"I love Kavanagh's work, especially Advent. My own father was from Monaghan and knew Kavanagh from the railways. My father was a ticket collector on the Dublin-Inniskeen route. Kavanagh was always travelling without a ticket. Not only that: he always travelled first class. That's another era, another time. I wouldn't lift him off the shelf every night of the week, though. He also wrote bad work: he can be wobbly as a poet. And he could have put a lot more energy into his own work rather than the litigation and fights he got involved with. Alcohol took a big grip on him. But Kavanagh is in the canon of great Irish writers, there's no doubt about that. I think the reason he's not so well known outside Ireland is largely because the books weren't widely available until recently. That's changed. In the next 20 years, I think, Kavanagh's reputation will grow internationally."
... Rosita Boland
All the past winners of the Patrick Kavanagh Award are included in the anthology Dancing With Kitty Stobling, edited by Antoinette Quinn and published by Lilliput Press, €12.99
Celebrating a life
Today
A free concert at City Hall in Dublin marks the opening of the Patrick Kavanagh Centenary Festival. It will include dramatised readings from The Green Fool and Tarry Flynn, readings of his poems by Patrick McCabe, Ardal O'Hanlon, Mary Kennedy and others, and a music recital by the Cullen Harpers. The event, which begins at 1 p.m. is free, but admission is on a first-come, first-served basis.
Derek Hand of St Patrick's College is talking about "Patrick Kavanagh, the image of the poet in the prose" at Dublin City Library and Archive, on Pearse Street, at 6.30 p.m. The lecture is free, but you should book ahead on 01-6744873.
Writers, musicians and friends of Kavanagh are taking part in Along The Enchanted Way, a commemorative evening at the National Concert Hall. The event is sold out.
Declan Gorman's stage adaptation of Kavanagh's The Green Fool is at the Pavilion theatre, in Dún Laoghaire, at 8 p.m. Tickets cost €20 (concessions €15). The production is here until Saturday, then visits Athlone (Tuesday), Kilkenny (Wednesday and Thursday), Longford (October 29th and 30th), Castlebar (November 2nd), Monaghan (November 3rd and 4th), Ballymun (November 5th and 6th), Galway (November 8th), Portlaoise (November 9th), Virginia (November 11th and 12th) and Armagh (November 13th). More information from www.upstate.ie.
An Post launches a Patrick Kavanagh stamp.
Saturday
Keelin Kavanagh, the poet's niece, unveils a plaque in Mucker, Inniskeen.
Also this month
Watch out for Kavanagh on the DART: six poems are being displayed on the trains.
November
This year's Patrick Kavanagh Weekend, in Inniskeen, Co Monaghan, is on November 26th-28th. Three days of poetry, debate, readings, music and lectures include a keynote address by Seamus Heaney.
More information from the Patrick Kavanagh Centre, at 042-9378560 or www.patrickkavanaghcountry.com
