Dear David, Billy and all,

David has conducted in high pomp the funeral rites for improvisation in
Irish poetry -- with such bravado and coloratura I might add that I'd
almost wish to be at that funeral even at the expense of such a corpse.
I said Kavanagh brought it as his gift to the Irish poetry party and I
wondered where it went.  David has it being hammered to death by the
prodigious talents of a prodigious number of prodigies.  Billy says
Kavanagh didn't bring it anyway and a whole load of his mates have it now.
Well, I don't disagree with the latter part of Billy's claim and the
former part may only be true according to my lights.  Kavanagh brought
improvisation to Irish poetry for me.  

I am thinking of his later poems.  Bunched up one after another in the big
green Complete Poems (published by Peter Kavanagh's hand press), they
seemed so informal they were hardly printed, though maybe I was also
responding to the fingerprints of Peter's hand press.  Now I was a
youngster, so I didn't care much about Grogans (though I was keener on
Gorgon's, it's true).  The other thing about the big green Complete Poems,
besides all these scrappy ambulatory dilatory throwaway poems for which
Kavanagh was so diligently excoriated, the other thing was a leaf of blue
paper which Peter Kavanagh had included with the book -- a few 
(handwritten) lines (scribbled on "the back of an old envelope" or a 
table napkin at least) eulogising the Beatles and the Stones -- I took it 
as a fleeting and gleeful homage to the Beats, Kavanagh got a good kick 
out of them). He also was the first poet I knew who was alive, i.e., living.

I suppose I should also make a distinction between improvisation and
invention.  Kavanagh's rhymes and lines in his late poetry are often so
awful that you have to laugh and I'm sure he did.  There was nothing
shiny or inventive about this poetry and the literati spat on it.  For
some reason, he didn't mind being truly awful -- that was meat and drink
to me because delight in the silliness of words wasn't something I
associated with old men.  I suppose you could say he cheered me up
permanently.  Augustus Young later had the same effect.  And Paul Durcan
too.  I think both of them mugged Kavanagh and made away with more than
Heaney got, which I will not quantify.  

Mairead


> Mairead
> 
> I saw it dying unheeded on the sidestreets of West Belfast as an exchange of
> verse-letters flew overhead. It had wept uninvited outside the beautiful
> house of John Banville's prose. Brendan Kenneally forsook it for a
> chat-show, Samuel Beckett typed out its epitaphs, Paul Durcan complained it
> drew no audience, the Celtic Tiger deigned to digest it, a Borstal Boy left
> it behind in the last pub but seven, thirty-five assorted poetlings in an
> anthology of the ignored practised its fakery as they imitated birthright
> accents, whereas Paul Muldoon exchanged it for beads with East Coast Indians
> whose chief seemed peculiarly like Joseph Campbell shouting in an
> echo-chamber. Yeats declaimed its virtues while his friends stole its glands
> and told him they were from a monkey. Incomprehensibly, unconsolably, it
> mourned alongside Joyce's blinded ghost by a bedside in a Northamptonshire
> asylum. The Irish Renaissance left it for a Tourist Board stipend while at a
> third remove a poet from Stratford E17 died ignored and 'so happy' and, as
> you so rightly put it, (and in that, joining Dryden's 'cousin Swift') -
> 'Irish by death'.
>r  Meanwhile, in a Soho restaurant, its publishers met : 'Out to Lunch'.
> 




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