Thanks Jamie and Tim....
For any other as unfamiliar with Padraic Fiacc as I was:
I found this 20-years-old article. (I had forgotten about the contrasted "passion for order" in the N. Irish school as it was seen in those days.)
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/the-patron-saint-of-the-insane-the-northern-irish-poet-padraic-fiacc-a-fiery-uncompromising-chronicler-of-the-troubles-is-celebrating-his-70th-birthday-with-the-publication-of-a-new-volume-damian-smyth-studies-the-critical-renaissance-of-this-literary-outsider-1421371.html
And Ricorso, as always, is very helpful:
http://www.ricorso.net/rx/az-data/authors/f/Fiacc_P/life.htm
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After writing about Seymour-Smith on Etienne Leroux, I found more information, and I wish I had said that Leroux's work was considered politically rebellious by himself and by by those who attacked it within the Afrikaans community. I can't remember to what extent Seymour-Smith knew this and dismissed it. Tough fate to be a an artist with an inward-turned and traditionalist audience. A book that asks all sorts of dangerously probing questions within its community might seem politically timid to outsiders.
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>But of course that's a comment on the poetry, not on the people who wrote it. Those people are probably a lot more concerned about the big issues than would appear so in their poems. If their poems really are this turning inward then surely it IS because of the big issues - the writing has its reasons, but those reasons are (and this relates to things you were saying in a post the other day to do with influence) not direct ones. Do you see what I mean? (he said in desperation).
Yes, I think so. There are large cultural movements that seem to affect many artists at once and may not relate very closely to the conscious opinions of individuals but to a restless sociopolitical anxiety that affects whole populations. Whitman's conception of the US was as something more than just another country, something like a new international consciousness. I don't know if that's relevant or not (probably not), but I feel that here too there's a kind of crisis about being a poet in a world that's no longer neatly divisible into national communities with their own agendas, in which our concerns are ever-more-predominantly international. The apparent turning inward might be part of an attempt to wrestle with the new transparency of the national skin, with how do you address palestine syria arctic drilling india's energy vietnam's fish farms and the great barrier reef - what kind of honest art can there be, must we look again at the peach-tree in the poet's own garden? - all those kind of anxieties.
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