Writers now facing new challengesIn a new environment for writers, where there is tough competition for bursaries, awards, teaching posts and writer-in-residence positions - which many writers can negotiate successfully and still manage to get work done within - we need to be aware of writers for whom this is alien territory.
So says Declan Meade in an editorial in the summer issue of the Stinging Fly (issue 10, vol 2: €7).
"This is the era of the literary CV. Please submit a detailed proposal outlining . . . ," he writes, describing a climate inhospitable to some writers for whom the filing of reports, the ticking of boxes, is anathema. "What value do we place on their work? How can they be supported?" he asks in a response to similar questions raised by Eavan Boland (below) in Islands Apart: A Notebook, an essay by the poet in a recent edition of the American journal Poetry (poetrymagazine.org).
Making the point that, whether they like it or not, the contemporary poet is expected to be increasingly skill-based - skills Boland makes clear are not negligible for the poet in the world and ones she wanted to acquire when young - she explains that, nevertheless, she's nagged at by the thought that many of the poets she admired when young were not skill-based.
"In Ireland, or the US or the UK, the tilt is towards the poet who can navigate the worlds of the university, the institution, the community, the reading series, the community workshop, the literary festival.
"There has been a gradual, perhaps calcifying, professionalism which requires of a poet a standard of behaviour and communality which poets were once exempted from. I was never uncritical of that exemption. But now, somehow, I wish I saw more of it," she writes.
There's enormous food for thought in both Meade's response and Boland's essay, which also incidentally has a lovely cameo about her years covering poetry readings for The Irish Times in her early 20s.
"The reading might be slated for 7pm. I would turn up on time at the theatre, the pub, the arts centre, the secondary school, the gallery. The poets might be there. They might equally not be there. The reading would begin. On time. An hour late. Two hours late. I would listen for the poems. I would shape my piece as I listened - quoting, referring, scribbling."
Around midnight she would climb the stairs of the old Irish Times's building "and if nothing on the night editor's face suggested that he had been waiting for this arrival, nevertheless I was given a chair and a typewriter. I would type out my article, hand it in and drive home in a city laundered by quiet and moonlight."
Second anthology by Stinging Fly Press
The Stinging Fly has announced that a second short story anthology will be published by the Stinging Fly Press in September. Called Let's Be Alone Together it will be edited by Declan Meade and contain 20 stories.
Meanwhile, this year's Stinging Fly prize will be judged by poet Sinéad Morrissey. The prize - €1,000 and two weeks at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Co Monaghan - goes to a writer who has yet to publish a book who has had work in the magazine during the year. www.stingingfly.org
Cultural highlights at summer school
Irish writers Desmond Egan and Brian Keenan, Iraqi poet Salah Niazi, who is currently translating Joyce's Ulysses, and Polish Gerard Manley Hopkins scholar Aleksandra Kedzierska are among those taking part in the 21st Gerard Manley Hopkins International Summer School in Monasterevin, Co Kildare from July 19th to 25th.
One of the high points has to be a concert with Paris-based Irish pianist Míceál O'Rourke in Moore Abbey - featuring John McCormack's piano.
Visit www.gerardmanleyhopkins.org for more.