TUESDAY MORNING

The most urgent thing this morning is to get to the Cork Archives
Institute where I booked time some weeks ago to investigate the
materials on Abolitionist and escaped slave Frederick Douglass's 1845
visit to Cork. But many smaller urgencies ambush priority: clothes
washing & drying; breakfast and lunch grocery shopping; umbrella
buying; phonecalls; shower; ironing. I have a great breakfast of
Jordan's Original with Maggie O'Sullivan. After a bumper bowl (of
granola) I jump up saying "Now to make lunch!" (meaning sandwiches to
take with me: McCambridges & Kilmeaden). Maggie misunderstands and is
in awe of my appetite. I am reminded of one of my own poems where I
eat all the meals for the week on Sunday to save time. I still think
it's an idea with possibilities.

From the Number 8 bus I see the windows of the Nurses' Home filled up
with shampoos and bottles, and think of belonging and lonely girls.
Walking again, near North Main Street, I see a woman, I'm guessing
Romanian, down on the sidewalk, begging, a child a little younger than
my child with her head in the woman's lap, face-down, like a little
jet at its gate. I don't know if she is sleeping or just eyes closed.
A pretty girl. Instinctively I had switched direction to cross the
road, but instead walk by, remembering Frederick Douglass writing to
William Lloyd Garrison about how the horrific poverty in Dublin
unmanned him, and made him afraid to go out of the house.

In the Archives Institute I have only 30 minutes, 15 spent waiting, 5
talking, and 10 looking at a letter Douglass wrote from Limerick to
Richard Dowden, Mayor of Cork:
"Trampeled, reviled and maltreated as I have been by white people
during the most of my life – early taught to regard my self their
divinely appointed prey – and ever looking upon such as my natural
enemies, you may readily imagine the grateful emotions that thrill my
heart when I meet with facts (?) forever dispelling the darkness of
such infernal doctrines." He says he has never encountered
consideration comparable to Dowden's from any other public figure of
his status, and thanks Dowden for the ring he has sent, which he says
he wears on the little finger of his right hand, though "I never
before wore one – or had the disposition to do so."

FIONA SAMPSON & AMIR OR

Fiona and Amir read together; and sometimes they read to each other
from letters they have written, all beginning "Dear You." I hear this
as "Dear Yu" and remember my brilliant student Yu, who was better than
my course.

Amir has a very pleasant voice and reads in English and Hebrew.
Hebrew sounds wary and warning after Yang Lian's acrobatic Chinese.
Amir introduces the first poem by saying that sometimes we feel the
poem is writing us, rather than that we are writing the poem. Keith
Tuma, beside me, breathes "Derrida." Amir reads a poem, "A Glass of
Beer," dedicated to his grandparents, killed in the Holocaust in
Poland.
This is the first of many grandparent poems to come (sneak preview:
Mark Weiss, Lee Harwood, Billy Mills). I think Amir leaves a lot of
room around his words and I like that: He seems able to include
silence. I think, again, that the sound system/acoustics in the room
is/are good. There are two mikes.

Fiona's voice is very English. She even says "perhaps." She has a
cluster of shale around her neck. Her tone is noticing, confident,
competent, clear. Billy Mills, Catherine Walsh and their two sons
come in: "We got lost … We couldn't find a parking place." I think of
walking around Cork dangling my younger self from my own hands.
Noticing Fiona's very nice dark jacket with sort of embossed cabbage
roses on the cuffs and hem, I think about what to wear to my reading
on Saturday. Fiona reads a long poem about illness. Amir looks more
and more concerned. I notice Keith Tuma's shirt, beside me, is almost
identical to mine. Keith takes something paper thin like varnish out
of a little box and eats it.

Amir and Fiona are collaborating on a book project: "It's not a diary;
it's not intertextual." When I hear Amir read the letters I think I
would be afraid if he wrote letters to me. Amir has a giant sheaf of
paper. He looks at Fiona as if he can't quite believe what he sees.
He reminds me of Russell Edson reading his poems: how Edson seemed to
have never seen them before in his life and found them in equal parts
shocking and delightful. I think again about how Alison read the
translations of Yang's poems last night, almost like a court
stenographer reading back the strangled testimony of witnesses at a
murder trial. Amir's poems definitely sound like poetry. I'm
imagining what he might look like when he gets old.

THE MEANEST THING I EVER HEARD IN A RESTAURANT

Before the next reading I go into the Quay Co-Op which I have
identified as my restaurant of choice for the duration. It's
wholefood, organic, great, a bit pricey and not over-generous on the
portions, but very convenient to the Christian Brothers School
(founded is 1828) where the Festival is being held. This is where I
hear the
meanest thing I ever heard in a restaurant. I am feeling a bit
parsimonious myself and decide to get just two salads and a coffee. I
don't take much milk (if I could get half-and-half I would) so I ask
the young woman at the register if she would fill it up a little more.
She says that if she were to fill it up more she'd have to charge
extra. And that the cups (very modest) were too large anyway. What
she could do, she said, was put a little hot water in it for me. I
said yes please, and thought "That's the meanest thing I ever heard in
a restaurant." And more or less said so.

INTERNATIONAL NECRONAUTICAL SOCIETY EMBASSY FROM CAUCUS

Now comes the time for the Caucus to return Monday night's diplomatic
gesture from SoundEye with a visit to the Festival HQ. The reading
room is taken over by overhead projectors, sound systems, charts,
definitions, bulletins. The INS representative describes the project,
charting a clockwise navigation of the material which involves, among
other things, generating poems according to "strict rules of poetic
form." One of the products is a horrible mongrel of villanelle (a
delicious form) and sestina (the form from hell). I definitely don't
like the look of that but the representative from the International
Necronautical Society is unfazed.

I had been thinking, while respecting what Trevor said about being the
most formal poet he knows, and having a high regard for formal
practice myself, that nevertheless it is more than possible for poetry
to escape its forms, to fly its nets, so what you might have left is a
rickety bamboo cage from which even a bandy-legged budgie could
escape. Which is a little bit like what I thought of the
International Necronautical Society's installation.

But there was fun nevertheless. I'm having a lot of fun too, ever
since, trying to remember the name/instigators of that
(between-the-wars?) project in Britian, which continued for years,
recording daily occurrences/frequencies of routine communal
events/happenings, and which later formed a date bank for consumer
research. Can someone help me out here? I also thought a bit about
the very great thing SoundEye is doing in tangling with boundaries,
concrete and generic, and the surprise package of mixed blessings
interdisciplinarity often delivers.

PETER MORGAN & JUDY KRAVIS
Before the 8.30pm reading I browse the books, spending all my time
looking at 5 or 6 books from Judy Kravis and Peter Morgan's Road
Press. *Very* enjoyable.

MARK WEISS & LEE HARWOOD
Well even though Mark looked more or less the same as usual I knew he
was all spruced up because I had traded shampoo for a loan of an his
umbrella earlier.
Lee read first. He says he would read 9 poems in 30 minutes. That
makes me think that my own plan to read 24 in 35 might not be
workable. Lee starts with love poems. He has a lovely very careful
voice.

Mark sits down for his reading. He sits behind a table. I'm sitting
in the back row of the audience but one thing I notice about Mark's
reading is how fluent his right hand, his head, and his right index
finger are. His voice is also very rich and clear.
One of the great things about Mark is that he knows Spanish. In this
reading, he translates a little Yiddish and also speaks very nice
French. I love hearing poetry riding along on all these languages at
this Festival.

During Mark's reading I also notice that the City of Cork Male Voice
Choir haven't given their room a good scrub in a long time. I wonder
what Christian Brothers schools would have been like if the Brothers
had had to do the cleaning themselves.
The floor is like molten lava (though I've never seen molten lava), a
wild swirl of knots surging under the glued down paint. The
wainscotting (that panelling that goes half-way up the wall) is deadly
brown. Trevor says it's important to remain positive. I suppose if
looked at from a more positive perspective this portion of the room
could resemble a pint of Guinness, before completely settled.

APPLICABLE SAYINGS
"Still waters run deep"/ "In the palm of his hand": Randolph
"Between a rock and a hard place": Yang Lian
"Without rhyme or reason": International Necronautical Society
"You could hear a pin drop": Lee Harwood

AFTERWARDS
We're all keen to go home but Trevor wants us to go look at his
bee-hives which we do, briefly.