Dear Seamus,

No, I was just making a general comment about the selling of Irish papers
to the American acadame. It's a sad case of Irish heritage being lost but
what's worse is that it was at a time when we were the second fastest
growing economy in the world. But then again some of the greatest Irish
writing was done in English and Gaelic amongst dire economic times so
maybe this recession has some light behind it.

Sadly the first thing governments cut back on is the arts and places like
the Irish Writer's Centre are already suffering. Our government is the
first to put a Joyce banner up when it draws tourists but the last to
think of supporting rising artists. I hope we don't wind up having our
writers leaving en masse again like we saw with Joyce's and Kinsella's
eras.

We are developing a research library at NUI Galway and I am trying to get
them to put funds up for buying poet's papers since my supervisor has his
hands in the pot on that one. We'll see... tell Gabriel that there might
be interest from NUI Galway. I could at least point him in the right
direction or have someone contact him. It's worth a try.

The archives sound like a mess allright but hopefully with the funding and
technology they can get on the ball and digitise the stuff so its not
thrashed. I nearly cry every time I visit the National Archives and they
bring out tattered papers in loose leaf folders!

I completely agree with you that Kinsella is the greatest Irish poet of
his generation. Heaney is OK but Kinsella is a consumate poet who is not
afraid to follow his muse wherever it leads him. His poetry shows levels
of experimentation and depth of thematic that Heaney's work doesn't. Fifty
years from now we may see Kinsella as the Yeats of his generation while
Heaney is but a pale Gogarty in comparison.

I still see Mr. Kinsella once in a while, he is healthy and well and
finally getting some recognition here in Ireland. He is living back in
Philadelphia most of the time for the last couple of years.

Thanks for taking the time to talk with me.

All the best,
Andrew
> Dear Andrew Browne,
>
> It was certainly not my intention to suggest that I thought Irish
> poets were to blame for selling their papers to the highest bidder ...
> if I gave that impression then I ought to bite my tongue!
>
> In fact recently, in an exchange of e-mails with Gabriel Rosenstock I
> suggested that Gabriel himself ought to threaten the NLI that he will
> GIVE his papers to Emory if the NLI doesn't make a decent offer for
> them!  I support the poets, not the institutions (who have been
> foolish in the extreme).
>
> The NLI on its web-site brags about all the manuscript literary work
> they have collected ... difficult to believe when we know where most
> of the literary collections of recent and older times have gone!
> Further, for several years the NLI on-line catalogue could not even
> display any page containing a "fada"!  It was difficult to believe
> such technical incompetence coming from a NATIONAL Library.  (That
> problem has been rectified lately, but nevertheless!)
>
> However, despite the current interest of American institutions in
> Irish literary collections, I see one terrible problem for the future
> ... as I will explain.
>
> The largest Irish archive in the U.S. is The Celtic Collection at the
> University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota.  Recently I had to
> drive several hundred miles to get there so I could look up the
> citation information for one footnote in a book I am working on.  I
> had the date of a quotation from an issue of An t-Ultach in 1978.  I
> needed the Volume Number, Issue Number, and page number of the
> quotation.  Unfortunately no one on the staff of this Celtic
> Collection knows even one word of Irish, so I had to go and check it
> myself.  A rather expensive trip for less than five-minutes of work!
>
> St. Thomas has thousands of treasures in its Collection, but finding
> those treasures can be very difficult.  They ignore all diacritics
> when cataloguing.  And they have not added the "h" as they ignore some
> of the older diacritics in older books.  The search-system itself
> directs that you NOT use the word "the"; however, since none of the
> staff know any Irish they have catalogued the word "An" not knowing
> that it is "the"!  The result is a total jumble of confusion, and
> wasted time.
>
> Another huge Celtic Collection is at St. Francis Xavier University in
> the province of Nova Scotia, Canada.  There too the staff do not know
> any Gaelic, with predictable confusions.
>
> In Ireland, we might expect some continuity of heritage and culture.
>
> But what about Atlanta, Georgia?  The site of Emory?  There isn't and
> there never was an Irish or Irish-American population-base in Atlanta.
>  And, for better or for worse, the United States is following its own
> social and political and cultural evolution.
>
> With the passage of time, as well as social and economic shifts, will
> Irish poetry collections be trashed by people who don't really
> understand what they are or why they are keeping them?
>
> Finally, Andrew, I would be pleased to chat with you about Thomas
> Kinsella, back-channel or front-channel, as you please.  I am very
> happy that someone is doing a thesis on him!
>
> Best regards,
>
> Séamas Cain
> http://alazanto.org/seamascain
> http://seamascain.writernetwork.com
> http://www.mnartists.org/Seamas_Cain
>
> _______________________
>
> On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 9:27 AM, Andrew Browne <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>> Most Irish poet's papers are held in the US. Boston College and Texas
>> have
>> huge holdings. It's a shame that the Irish universities, amidst our
>> recent
>> economic success, did not secure more of them for our own researchers.
>> Instead we have a huge steel spike on O'Connell Street to remind us of
>> the
>> heroin problem amongst our economically displaced. Can't really blame
>> the
>> poets for selling to the highest bidder; it's not like their poetry
>> sales
>> provided them with huge salaries. Most, like Kinsella, spent a good
>> part
>> of their lives teaching in the US (Temple and Illinois).
>>
>> I'm in the final stages of a PhD thesis on Kinsella. Would love to chat
>> to
>> you more back-channel if your interested.
>>
>> Andrew
>>
>> --
>> Andrew Browne, AA(Pen. Coll.), BA(DCU), MPhil(DU)
>> IRCHSS Government of Ireland Research Scholar
>> Department of English
>> National University of Ireland, Galway
>>
>


-- 
Andrew Browne, AA(Pen. Coll.), BA(DCU), MPhil(DU)
IRCHSS Government of Ireland Research Scholar
Department of English
National University of Ireland, Galway