THE centenary of Austin Clarke's birth was Thursday, and that evening in TCD's Swift Theatre my English lecturer of bygone days, Maurice Harmon, presided over a celebration in honour of the poet. The author of a fine book on Clarke Maurice Harmon is very much a UCD man (don't ask me what mean by that, but I'm one, too, and so also was Clarke who, incidentally, graduated in English Language and Literature, just as I did. Interesting, no?).
However on Thursday night Maurice was aided and abetted by the ineluctably (if also indefinably) Trinity trio of Brendan Kennelly, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain and Gerald Dawe. Such ecumenism would have been unthinkable in the bad old days when Clarke was fired from his lecturing job in UCD for having the audacity to get married in a registry office.
I don't know how Clarke was regarded by students in the Trinity of the Sixties, but there was a distinct Kavanagh versus Clarke thing up in Earlsfort Terrace you either loved Clarke or you loved Kavanagh, and that was that. And whereas you might think that Clarke's anti clericalism would have been just the tonic for students intent on throwing off the shackles of a conservative Catholic education, myself and most of my contemporaries were firmly on the side of Kavanagh.
Perhaps it's something to do with preferring verse that effortlessly sings rather than verse that effort fully snipes. That, at any rate, has been my view down through the intervening years. However, the centenary sent me back to Clarke's poems for the first time in long while, and I read again "Martha Blake at Fifty One" and "The Straying Student" and "Ancient Lights" and some other poems that now seem very fine. And I loved as much as ever the four line "Penal Law"
Burn Ovid with the rest. Lovers will find
A hedge school for themselves and learn by heart
All that the clergy banish from the mind.
When hands are joined and head bows in the dark.
IN her new book, Susan Jeffers exhorts me to Erid the Struggle land Dance with Lee. Never having been much of a dancer (I can just about manage The Twist, but then who can't?), I find it difficult to take up Susan's offer just as it was hard to comply when, in her first book, she instructed me to Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. Do what anyway? Hang glide off Liberty Hall? Play football against Vinny Jones? Read a Joan Collins novel?
Such facetiousness, I'd imagine, is rare among disciples of the philosophy being peddled by Ms Jeffers and her sell healing colleagues. Of course, it's not self healing at all End the Struggle and Dance with Life may be subtitled "How To Build Yourself Up When the World Gets You Down", but Ms Jeffers (Susan Jeffers, Ph.D, according to the cover) is the person who's claiming to tell you how and who's charging you £8.99 for the privilege of learning the secrets she professes 19 know.
I've read through the book, and I think it's complete tosh, full of those woozy feel good exhortations and mind numbing banalities that used to be the preserve of hippies who had smoked one joint to many. Now they're a mainstream industry indeed, given the massive sales of Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, I'd imagine that Ms Jeffers has ended the struggle mentioned in her title and is dancing, if not with life, then all the way to the bank.
Yet for whatever reason (the decline of religion, the death of community, the feeling of helplessness in an impersonal world), more and more people are turning to these self help books. Perhaps they're finding solace in them it's not for me to say, and it would be pointless to suggest that they might find a greater solace elsewhere. Some of these people will no doubt be in Eason's of O'Connell Street next Friday evening when Ms Jeffers will be giving a talk and selling a few more copies.
STAYING with Eason's if you bought your copy of today's Irish Times early enough, and if you live in Dublin, and if you're not housebound for the day, and if you're a fan of Joseph O'Connor, and if you've always wondered what the nine towns in the US called Dublin are really like (quite a lot of ifs and ands there), you should make your way promptly to the O'Connell Street bookstore.
In that emporium at 12.30pm, Mr O'Connor will be signing copies of his new book. This is called Sweet Liberty, it concerns travels among the Irish in America, it visits those nine towns, and Picador are publishing it at £15.99.
I see that West Indian poet and 1992 Nobel prizewinner Derek is being sued for sexual harassment by a woman student who was in his creative writing class at Boston University.
He's refusing to comment on the allegations, but this is not the first time such charges have been made against him just after he won the Nobel prize, a woman he taught at Harvard made a similar accusation, calling him an "academic sexual predator".
I was struck by his reply to that earlier charge. He declared that whatever he had said to the student stemmed from his "deliberately personal and intense" teaching style which, he added, was necessary to teach the "passionate" subject of poetry. Maybe he should have taught classes in accountancy instead.