Went to Dun Laoighaire to the annual Poetry Now festival (PN 07) on Saturday evening. Derek Mahon and Robert Haas were reading. It was a fine event. I really enjoyed sitting there in the dark, packed house, the single, white stage light focused on the podium. It's a great venue for hearing poems, for watching poets in action.
They were a terrific pair to see in the one night. Mahon and Haas. The Irish poet of the whiplash wit, legendary erudition, vinegary aspect. He of the tight, tender, classical poems. There's an enormous scope of ambition and reach to Mahon's poems, and they return that ambition generously and suprisingly. He made a quirky, mischievous selection of his own poems and his versions of other poets' works (Beckett, Rilke). I wish he'd gone on for another hour.
Haas was all Mahon wasn't. Loose, rangy, sunny sometimes. His voice, his California accent, his presentation all belie what's going on in the poems, which are philosophical tracts injected with the particularities of his life. His ear is well-tuned to casual speech, and he knows just where to place right words. I loved the use of "and they are wholly unsupervised" in one poem--like Frost, he has that ear, that love for the conversational.
One of the things I loved on the night was to see each poet's response to the introduction he was given by Peter Fallon, who is the founder/publisher of The Gallery Press (Mahon's publisher). Fallon has a surprisingly high voice for a man of his stature. He introduced Mahon with high speech; he obviously has enormous respect for the poet. He told us that after the judges of the David Cohen Prize for literature in England had reached a unanimous decision to award it to Mahon (which they did last week), they broke into applause. Fallon told us that he had heard it from Andrew Motion (the chair of the judging panel), and he was not making it up. Really.
Mahon then strode out, the two men passing as the one exited and the other entered. Mahon reached the podium, pulled the mike down towards his mouth (he's quite short). "Peter tends to exaggerate," he said, his merry eyes squinting out at us.
After a different, equally salutory introduction to Haas, Fallon headed for stage left as Haas came out from the same side. Haas stopped him, shook his hand, hugged him with one arm and then made for the podium where he thanked Peter for his wonderful introduction, thanked John McAuliffe for all the help, thanked all of us for coming, and you get the picture. It was nice, but compared to Mahon's reticence and salty wit, it was gushing. And I just loved that about the both of them on the night. The Irish make us Americans seem so sweet and open about everything. We, even a poet of depth such as Haas, embarrass the Irish a bit, or a lot. You could just feel it in that literary audience. And then when Haas read a few poems about his mother and her drinking problems and all that, the difference between him and Mahon just sang out. Again, it was lovely. Because Haas's confessional poems aren't gratuitous. In fact, it could all be a fiction (though I suspect not)--but the stories set within the poems are right for where the poems take those stories. And how they transform them into a larger vision.
But Mahon would never never do that in a poem. He would never write about his mother drinking in a closet.
Haas read a lot of new poems, which were terrific. Many of them took strange, swift, left-hand turns before they ended. I look forward to encountering them again on the page.
Great reading. Thanks John McAuliffe (who bows out as director this year) and all the other folk who organized PN O7.
Wax Ear
