Hello Doug.

Sorry about being a boor when we first met; but at least any unpleasantness between us occured at the beginning of our interaction and was got out the way at the start.

When I saw Geddes and thought he was a role model, it was in the same vein as I think Longley's act in public at readings, is the right role model.

Longley, when I saw him first at the now defunt Bank of Ireland Arts Centre in Foster Place, College Green, just opposite Trinity - was the ultimate empathetic professional whose humanity shone out from him, much like Geddes low key, just like everybody, average anyone whose poetry took a back seat to being normal.

He started his reading, and people were still drifting in, and he would just stop where he was, acknowledging them and making sure they got seats, instead of ignoring them and making it more like a religious service by a hierphantic waffler in thrall with their own divinity delivering poems in the exact same tone and register of a sermonizing priest.

I remember thinking, here's one at the top who doesn't look poety, someone you'd meet in a pub or cafe and strike up a conversation with and the poetry would be in the background, not in yer face from the off. Hello, my names Michael and I'm a poet kind of carry on you get with the more obsessed types. Like myself for the first five years, after a 20 year blockage, a wholly manic roller wanting to share with everyone what I was learning and the poems spurting out that I was writing and memorizing - only dampening down in the last few years until, now, poetry is in the background and dropped occassionally into the social mix, since getting my shore feet and feeling comfortable with it being a long haul enterprise, hopefully.


Like Longley, the poems of Geddes tho, are a whole different kettle of fish. I wasn't overly impressed with them, and thought them ok but nothing special. Not like Tom Paulin who I saw read at the Liverpool Irish Festival 2003; and unlike Geddes and Longley, made up in social frostiness, what he lacked in the paucity of poetic talent dept.

He read a piece of poetry that had a lot of toponyms in it, and as he did, it was clear he was in love with the poem, with himself I suppose. He was the star reader out of him, Michael Murphy and Bernard O'Donaghue, who I had took an hours workshop with each of them, latching onto O Donaghue most because I had just written a poem for my freind's third sone, whose wife had delivered him on her birthday, and at that time, year three, just on the way out of the academy - was still memorizing every poem as it came out, and remember reciting it from memory to O Donaghue and, tho I didn't recognize it at the time, that immediate connection he must have made, that a 'real' thing turned up in his workshop.

Murphy was more stand-offish, understandable because I was less than ten years younger and too close in age to be relaxed in the professor-student roles. I bent O Donaghue's ear about my dreams of writing English language poetry in Irish bardic meters, still at the stage when I was all consumed and out to prove, barley three years out the traps, a weird 36 year old who only got going, like O Donghue, in my thirties, which is probably why he connected thinking about it now.

After the session with him, feeling I was closer to getting in that misty citadel of Letters manned by the verbal magicians yet to make themselves known to me; feeling uprushed mentally - O Donaghue introduced me to Paulin, who I had spotted earlier in the morning coming in, and mistook for a local middle-aged scouse bloke, dressed down at heel and there probably to stalk Tom Paulin, whose face I had seen on a stack of books when first entering the festival building myself that morning - not realizing the picture of Paulin was a standard 15 year old one.

O Donaghue, silent to my waffling at him, said my name to Paulin and he fixed this look at me and took the hand of this energetic, clearly over enthusiastic sort tweny years younger than himself, in the manner you'd handle a dog turd, I remeber thinking at the time. A limp, forced non-shake, not even making a pretence it was voluntary on his part, only done so under the duress of his Oxford colleague.

So, the poet with the strongest work on the page, in person, that day, was the one who gave me the impression of bneing most up themself. Something I forgave him for after the privilege of witnessing him live.