Kay Ryan is not talking about Irish Water in the quotation below but she could be...

‘We talk about the ridiculous and the sublime. I would simply conflate them and say that they sit on top of each other and they are concurrent’. ‘I have poems that are ridiculous, for example “Home to Roost”, the chickens are circling and blotting out the day. Well, that’s quite ridiculous – it’s already funny. But then, very quickly, it isn’t funny – even though it’s a very wild and funny image – pretty soon it’s not funny at all.’ ‘…these / are the chickens / you let loose / one at a time…  / Now they have / come home to roost – all / the same kind / at the same speed.’ An Interview with Kay Ryan Former US Poet Laureate Skylight 47  Issue 3  2014.       http://skylight47poetry.wordpress.com/

DANCING THE SPIRAL

 I was at a newspaper stand at Malaga airport when I discovered the Dancing the Spiral workshop I designed had made it to the front page, top story, of the Irish Independent (25.10.2014). I’d intended to buy an international newspaper but I was hooked. Apparently the title was sufficiently noteworthy in itself not to merit further explanation in the newspaper article. It would have spoiled the innuendo. I will return to the workshop but the article led to related considerations.

Mary Robinson, in her inaugural speech as President of Ireland, famously spoke of ‘Mna na hEireann’, ‘women of Ireland’. She said she would also like also to be President of the mythical Fifth Province – the province of our imaginings of ourselves. During the course of her presidency she lit a candle for ‘the Irish diaspora’ in the window of an upstairs room at Aras An Uachtarain, the official residence of the Irish President in Phoenix Park.

These words and images remain in the hearts and minds of Irish men and women at home and around the globe. They are quoted or recalled because they had an effect.  They made us think differently and create change because the consciousness evoked has led, or leads, to increments of action that might not have happened if they had not inspired, encouraged or emboldened us.

Symbolic and resonate, their poetry and rhetoric, go beyond the level of everyday discourse - with more effect. They provide food for thought. This is the quality of language that poetry and mythology put at our disposal, allowing space for art and science to overlap and meet.

We might define myth as the narrative of our personal and collective mythologies. Within this definition, science might even be included. From an historical and anthropological perspective we could perhaps see it as the defining – or prevailing - mythology of our time; the way we most effectively explore, discover and understand the truth of human life and the universe inhabited, and influenced, by species of every kind but few would argue that art and literature don’t have something to add to that understanding and its expression.

Joseph Campbell has written about prevailing patterns – or archetypes - across cultures within these mythologies. Campbell, as described by the poet and business consultant David Whyte, talks in The Hero’s Journey of how a life’s journey is more visible considered as in the wake of a ship than as a clearly defined path ahead at any one time.

When I think of a resonating pattern of connection between people and their cultures and the rituals through which it is expressed, I think also of dance. We can talk about how people occasionally use language ‘to dance around each other’ or the dance that families or particular groups of people engage in meaning a way of describing a recognisable pattern of interaction. Mystics, and people who have experienced moments of heightened awareness, have described their story as one of experiencing themselves momentarily as part of a universe that is vibrating in a kind of cosmic dance. I wonder has Riverdance, with its powerful display of tap-dancing, had such international appeal because it taps into something of this universal language - a river in rhythm that repeats itself in various ways in the music of different cultures, starting perhaps with drumming. But those more knowledgeable about music than I am would be needed to discuss this further.

The pattern that connects (a term borrowed from the anthropologist and early family therapist Gregory Bateson); the dance of that pattern, or those patterns, an understanding of systems – of how we are part of a living system of life  – a dance that simultaneously delivers, and fails to deliver, desired outcomes informs our imaginings of ourselves. Dance implies movement. We are either dancing; agents in life, engaging with agency, active beings or, we are dying from stagnation – perhaps we may even be doing both, at the same time. Stagnant pools, however, are not enticing. Streams, with dancing droplets of sparkling water, entice. You’re dancing when you put your feet on the floor each morning. If you stay in bed, stay recumbent too long, your body will ultimately decay.

Hindu mythology has Shiva  and Kali. ‘Kali is the black goddess of destruction, the logical wife for Shiva and the Dance of existence…’(The Oxford Companion to World Mythology, David Leeming, Oxford University Press). In Christianity, Sydney Carter’s hymn or song Lord of the Dance has the lines: ‘I danced in the morning/ with the moon and the sun…// …I danced on a Friday/ and the sky turned black/ it’s hard to dance with devil on your back…..// and chorus ‘Dance then, wherever you may be…// I am the dance/ and the dance goes on’ where he uses dance as a metaphor for God.

What better symbol for life than a spiral? Archimedes first described his mathematical spiral in the third century BC.. Descartes explored spirals further in the seventeenth century. Triple spirals are carved on stone at the ancient burial site at Newgrange.  Spirals intrigue us sufficiently to have something to say to our notions and imaginings of life. One participant in the community workshop I facilitated, titled Dancing the Spiral - and designed for the support and continual development, both professional and personal, of psychotherapists and other participants with related interest - spoke of how the spiral in the name evoked for her the double helix associated with DNA.

In the Dancing the Spiral workshops participants discovered the healing and other benefits that could come as they shared the narratives of their lives – their own personal mythologies – and engaged: through conversation, imagery and meaningful ritual and as they supported each other to play: make art – with clay,  pastels, through pantomime, to learn to dare to be creative and discover more of who they were (and are, the workshop continues as a self- sustaining community) and could be and how that could support their day to day work, wellbeing and resourcefulness away from the group. They explored what it takes to build community. In the free hours they went walking, swimming, climbed mountains, meditated and encouraged those afraid of such things to face those fears. All of this took place in the context of being mindful of a pattern that connects, being a microcosm within the macrocosm of life, developing a circle of friends, a circle that connects and overlaps with all the circles in their lives.

We can become circumscribed by a certain language. Hence, Jesus, in the bible – when he is being ‘accused’ of healing and corralled into a corner by the questions of the Pharisees says something akin to, ‘Is it better to say, ‘your sins are forgiven’ or that your wounds have been healed? The way we understand and/or describe the manner of our healing may not be as important as the healing itself.

We are not done with understanding the art and science of healing - whether it be of bodies or minds. A recent fascinating television programmed documented pioneering research on the placebo effect - undertaken in Harvard and other places of renowned scholarship – which suggests that its effect may be much greater, whether in orthodox or other healing practices, than has been hitherto appreciated. Even in spinal surgery, where it would seem an unlikely factor, early studies suggest it has significance. It may become a more deliberate ingredient in the medicine of the future.

The Dancing the Spiral community workshop that took place initially over twelve days a year, in one six-day and two three-day blocks, is based on fairly orthodox practice – drawn from the fields of group therapy facilitation, psychotherapy and psychology but there is a need to be careful when suggesting the denigration of any therapy people find healing (whether orthodox allopathic or classified as complementary to such) because people find healing in unexpected places and their healing is valuable. It ought not to be undermined by otherwise valuable efforts: to reach better understanding of medicine and what is needed for wellbeing or by the need to protect people from fraud. The best of physicians, and investigators, are all too aware that their treatments have to be delivered in the light of history which reveals that the good practice of today also has potential to become the unfortunate practice of yesterday while the fraudulent ‘cures’ of today have propensity to be discovered to have hitherto unappreciated value.

The challenge we face is to find ways to evaluate good enough practice in the promotion of healing, wellbeing and the building of resilience that don’t undermine the very thing we seek to promote.

Not so 'Boring snoring?' Is Leo Varadkar breaking the gridlock Ian Katz sees in political interviews?

It was a relief to hear Leo Varadkar, the new Irish Minister for Health, when he broke with tradition in August by telling his listeners in interviews that the policies of his predecessor and fellow cabinet member, James Reilly, are not deliverable in the time frame that had been proposed and need to be reviewed. He openly acknowledged he had come to this view in light of the briefing documents he received.

Catching up with last weekends’ Financial Times Life & Arts supplement last night, his remarks are additionally interesting. ‘Boring snoring?’ is an article considering the death of political interviews and the need for their restoration to life. Ian Katz, of BBC’s Newsnight, the author, offers four ‘modest ideas’ as to how the deadlock he sees politicians and their interviewers caught in might be broken - to the benefit not only of both but of their listeners.

It is a more serious matter than simply the question of what makes good radio and television. Politics itself is coming into disrepute. Turning off – whether by zoning out, flipping channels or moving to Netflix – has the subliminal effect of suggesting politics itself is irrelevant. When we remind ourselves that ultimately politics is what we depend upon to find solutions to problems that otherwise are solved by warfare, Ian Katz’s article and Leo Vardakar’s fresh approach are to welcomed.

Far from being attacked for what could be seen as Government failure, Varadkar’s remarks were positively received and led to questions that have been met with a rare, degree of openness. This has led to constructive discussion on the challenges of delivering health services, both across the globe and here, in the economic context of emerging from a bail out.

Katz says, ‘So, here’s a challenge to politicians: if you will dare to be a little more candid, to come to the crease a little less padded up, to answer questions rather than avoid them, we will give you the space to explain your politics and yourself, to show the public that you are a well-intentioned and rounded human being, to earn that most precious of political commodities, authenticity.’

Enda Kenny, the Government, and the media here in Ireland, ought to be very careful about how they respond to Leo Varadkar’s candour. He has won the rare respect, in current times, of the audience for political interviews. He may be showing the way forward. It is, at very least, an experiment to be encouraged.

These stanzas from poem Cloud Money interesting in relation to Dublin Bitcoin Conference

Interesting to hear commentary on the Bitcoin Conference in Dublin this week. Here are the final stanzas of my unpublished poem Cloud Money written a few years ago.

...Cloud computing

volumising

it was always going to happen

cheque books

redundant.

I do hope designers

are conceiving

transitional systems

of exchange

and are

more creative

than the bankers

Or maybe

designing

is being left

to the usual

moneymakers

whose only design

is on pockets.

 Susan Lindsay

Susan Lindsay is the author ofWhispering the Secrets & Fear Knot. (Doire Press 2011,2013) She is co-editor of Skylight 47,‘possibly Ireland’s most interesting poetry publication’. She read for Poetry Irelands’ Introductions series in 2011. Susan Tweets @susanhlindsay

Ambiguity Has Value Until You Want to Pin Down ‘The’ Truth - Part 1.

Poetic license is important.

Why let the truth get in the way of good story? This catholic world viewpoint can drive a protestant soul mad. Protestant souls are more Yorkshire minded – a spade is a spade, or it is not.

Gerry Adams was not a member of the IRA. Yet, if he was not a member he wouldn’t have had the necessary standing to be able to negotiate the Northern Irish Peace Process.

The Regulator ‘can’t recall' a lot about what he was regulating when Anglo Irish bank Directors discussed with his Office a deal that would prevent the Irish banking system from collapse. If the Irish banks had collapsed the ripple effect would almost certainly have had many banks in other parts of the world follow suit. I still await and wonder about a further possible truth emerging that not only the Irish Central Bank but the European – and maybe American – Central Authorities were blinding their eyes facing in this direction too and acting in accord. It worked for everyone (on one level), except those who want to bring to account those responsible.

It’s tempting to leave it there - at the border that has us turn our own eyes and ears away.
But let’s persevere. Would we rather the Regulator, or the Central Bank who really held the reins, had stuck to the letter of the law, disallowed a ‘technically’ (I imagine this might have been a word used to describe it in the circumstances) illegal loan to friends, and favoured clients, of the bank for the greater good of saving the system? If the Regulator had not happened to be looking the other way at the time and the loan was not allowed and the banking system collapsed would we then be bitter about slavish attention to following the rule book when wriggle room was required? Or, would we prefer they had stuck to the regulations, allowed the system collapse – or at least, by facing up to the crisis in a different way, have saved only part of it. For example, the deposits of ordinary punters. But then, how do you distinguish between ‘ordinary punters’ and the ‘commercial’? And, wasn’t it the ‘commercial punters’ who went out on a limb, took risks to employ people and to build the Celtic Tiger Ireland that we like to thrash now while still wanting to retain the benefits of infrastructure, coffee shops and the higher standard of living that, despite all, lies in its wake? Having done this for the country, why do we want to make these the particular fall guys?

Would we prefer Gerry Adams had always told us clearly that he was a valued member of the IRA and had the Unionists and others continue to refuse to negotiate a Peace while he was anywhere near the process? Can we give the loyalists credit for being absolutely sure in their heart of hearts he was in the IRA but being willing to fudge it for the greater good of saving lives if a Peace Accord could be agreed (and, remember these were protestant souls for whom this kind of ambiguity is much more difficult!). Of course if Gerry Adams wants the past left behind, then he and his party must put to rest the parts they still want to accuse the British Government and loyalists for also. Negotiating this territory is the business of continuing to build peace in Northern Ireland. It is naïve and dangerous for those in the South to pretend that there is no need for us to accept the ambiguities underlying the Peace our government struggled to assist.

These are the grown up questions most of us, let’s face it, don’t want to have to decide. We’d prefer to have our elders decide them for us and blame them when things go wrong. You can argue they were/are the ones whose job it is to know. But when it comes to deciding these quandaries and weighing up the obvious legal and correct way against what appears to be (and may or may not be) for the greater good then any one of us has to face that decision on our own. You have to choose the ground you’re going to stand on and take the consequences. Those are the moments you discover who you are.

Ireland to Lead the Way in Developing Inclusive Religious Education - A Target

 With Ireland’s missionary history and the resultant diaspora, Ireland’s education system should develop an inclusive religious vision to support the development of peaceful structures for a global future. Karen Armstrong won the 2008 prize for her talk to TED. She proposed an international Charter, to be compiled by representatives of all the major world religions in conjunction with the United Nations, based on The Golden Rule, that you do onto others as you would like done to you or, at least, do not treat others as you would not wish to be treated yourself. ‘Every single religion’ believes in this core rule, espoused by Confucius well before Christ.

The TED prize led to the birth of the Charter for Compassion. Those who do not believe in a particular religion, or religion at all, would be inclined to agree with its principle. Atheists, too, agree on compassion and basic goodness, they just don’t believe religion is a necessary component. No-one who thinks seriously about religion – either for or against – is against what has come to be described as this basic rule. Cities in many countries are signing up to the global Charter.

Within that context the value of different religious perspectives can be explored and understood, including atheism and agnosticism. Surely that is the kind of inclusive religious understanding it would be good to teach our children!

You can watch Karen Armstrong's prize-winning speech here. (It's worth watching whatever your views.) 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8idmgp4icq4‎

‘We are living in world where religion has been hijacked… A lot of religious people prefer to be right rather than compassionate… it is time to move beyond toleration to appreciation’ Armstrong at TED.

In the context of diversity, there need be little problem with children learning the practices and perspective of particular religious creeds. I recall international conferences where teachers of Eastern religions, popular with the Westerners turning to them, kept insisting that ‘this is in your own religion too, you should develop your practice there’.  Learning more particular practice could be partially done in the classroom – everyone’s religious practice should be of interest to everyone else so as to fully understand it – and the final part could be undertaken (such as preparations for First Communions) in their own particular religious establishments.

Mindfulness meditation, based on research findings about its benefits, is now taught by psychologists and others who have been trained to teach it, for wellbeing and good mental health alone. It may have come from Buddhism but the process is essentially similar to the more mystical practices of Christianity such as ‘centring prayer’. Those who argue for a more activist, justice based, faith can have no problem with discussion about justice issues and the questions activism raise. Considerations about to how to make the world a better place are relevant to everyone in education. The perspectives of different religions on the theme are relevant.

There need be no problem in developing an inclusive and inspiring religious education system. It might well be a system that would prepare students far more effectively in learning to live in faith – religious or otherwise. It could be somewhere for Ireland to lead, as the missionaries did with earlier understandings.  

Poohsticks get me back on Verse after overdose of Tweets. Notes from an Apprentice Verse-Maker (2)

Twitter – part of an apprenticeship in writing poems.

I’ve become a Twitterbug!  Made it: through nine years of work-shopping a poem a week; two Collections published;  a small nod from officialdom in terms of winning an invitation to read for Poetry Ireland; the odd publication in a journal – detour of winning a prize on radio and hearing a poem set to music (mega fun) - and reading at the odd festival. Now it seems overdue to focus on how to make a possible readership aware of the glories awaiting them between my covers. In other words, I’m buying into something I’ve known all along, publishers present - and in future – want authors who will sell books.

Learning Social Media to introduce verse and prose.

I’m not great at writing begging letters for invitations to read (you don’t know what you’re missing, I’d be delighted to receive an invitation from you) and anyway that wouldn’t be obvious to publishers unless they get results. I’m a bit lost on Facebook, they keep changing rules I can’t keep up with. Given a hand to set up a blog and twitter account, I set off and I’m hooked! Moi – who hates everything IT! Now, I’ve taken a computer on holiday for the first time ever. I’m writing Tweets watching TV. My old self, luckily demolished (see Fear Knot – published by Doire please note!) is turning over in her mummified grave. I’ve discovered the adrenalin rush – or is it testosterone, given research on how power poses, affect testosterone and cortisol levels (see TED talk on topic) – possible when a Tweet is’ favourited’ or re-tweeted. I’m oiling up my community support gears. Enjoying the challenge of discovering how to apply what I previously learned about supporting and joining community to this medium. Highlights of the last week involved getting over the ‘50 Followers’ hump and Poetry Ireland re-tweeting my notice that Skylight 47 has a submission deadline of 1^st April, thus bringing it to the attention of a much greater ‘target audience’.

Scary Success at Starting Something New.

I know I’ve made it when my daughter notes I have so many Tweets. Maybe I’m over tweeting! Somewhere I’ve ticked a box that has my Facebook page full of tweets. It’s scary. And I launched my second ‘public profile’ photograph – even more frightening (with a bit of preening when people ‘like’ it), who is this woman?

Restored to Verse-Making – Poohsticks* at Belvedere House on Mothers’ Day.

I wake up on Monday morning wondering have I ceased being in line to write verse altogether. I reflect on yesterday – Mother’s Day. I was blessed to meet family at Belvedere House, Mullingar. Seeing my grandson engrossed in following his twigs along an accessible stream while we waited, reminded me to initiate my grand-daughter (who has just got started on the walking) into the joys of Poohsticks too. She had just added ‘lake’ to her short vocabulary – probably any patch of water for now, but she will learn to distinguish further. Those Poohsticks, meandering along the stream, are mesmerising. The pleasures of dropping twigs on one side of a bridge and rushing to the other side to see them come through or lamenting their imprisonment - in mud or log-jammed amidst others underneath the bridge, hotly disputed debates about whose stick it is that is winning, memories of Winnie the Pooh, Christopher Robin and the knowledge we’re participating in a ritual begun several generations past. All of this is a necessary respite from Twittering. Listening to birds – in full song at Belvedere House at the end of March - and the legacy of  A.A. Milne restores me. Maybe I could try writing a poem again.

*The little book of Poohsticks, Rules and Tactics, stuck in to The Enchanted World of Winnie-the-Pooh, Published by Dutton , gives:

 ‘Introsticktion/ The very first game of Poohsticks was played by by Pooh by himself. // One morning he was crossing abridge on the edge of the Foreset, when he tripped and dropped a fir-cone into the water.//Pooh noticed a curious thing: he had dropped the fir-cone on one side of the bridge, but it came out on the other. A second fir-cone did the same. Then he tried dropping in two at once and guessing which would come out first.//And so the game of Poohsticks was born.’

This is a gorgeous book of introduction to the world of Pooh and friends, author  A.A. Milne & E.H.Shepard (illustrations).

You can discover the possibilities of Belvedere House at http://www.belvedere-house.ie/

Move Your Hand Across Paper - Notes From an Apprentice Poet

I've been walking about for a week,wondering how to get started on my next piece for writing.ie. I can’t get started. Then I remember Natalie Goldberg’s  The Rules of Writing Practice. Rule 1: Move your hand across paper. That’s how I recall it. The actual first rule is ‘Keep your hand moving’. In a gleeful first chapter to Wild Mind  (Rider imprint from Random House), and a follow on to Writing Down the Bones, she discovers her rules apply to sex too!

I set the oven timer to 10 minutes, sit down at the computer and type without ceasing – anything that comes to mind. After ten minutes I am surprised to find I have a draft for a third of the column. I am always surprised when things I should know work actually produce the goods! With a mental ‘thank-you’ to Natalie Goldberg, I set the timer again and return to the key board. A few hours later – allow extra for the breaks I took to gain perspective - of writing, but mostly editing I an able to submit Having a Laugh with Poetry to Vanessa O’Loughlin. Maybe it will suit, or maybe I’ll have to go again. But now I’m walking around having regained confidence in being able to find a way in.

I suspect I’ll be bringing you more about Goldberg’s Rules in future.

See http://nataliegoldberg.com/  She has a new edition of her book about art and colour coming

 http://nataliegoldberg.com/wp-content/themes/thesis_184/custom-8/images/natalie-goldberg-2013.jpg

More at:

http://whisperdownthewritealley.wordpress.com/2011/10/25/natalie-goldbergs-rules-for-writing-practice/ 

http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Down-Bones-Freeing-Edition/dp/1590302613

1.   Writing Down the Bones - Shambhala Publications

www.shambhala.com/writing-down-the-bones-1.html‎

o     

For more than twenty years Natalie Goldberg has been challenging and cheering onwriters with her books and workshops. In her groundbreaking first book, she ...

Ripples in the Fabric of Spacetime - link

'... ripples in the fabric of spacetime'.

Lichen clusters on bare branches like bog cotton

'Up the airy mountain/Down the rushy glen' I quote childhood lines of memory on the board walk, amidst bare heather branches and lots of wet moss just under the water in this bog-land wilderness over looking Lough Gill. Inisfree is in view. It's the Sligo Way. I'm in my element. Not surprisingly, my companion is looking at me strangely. My grandfather used to recite the poem dangling us on his knee. These words of William Allingham were probably the first poetry I heard, apart from Nursery Rhymes. We've visited Dromahair. I have ancestors here.

There are wisps of cotton like lichen on bare heather. I have to stoop to prove they're not bog cotton. On the way down I spot a cluster of lichen on bare rock, squat to take a  photograph.

Having the Conversation - About Beauty, its Possible Obligations.

Thanks to the interest of my local community Conversation number three is about to begin!

A year ago I facilitated the first Conversation, in what has become a series. In Ashes, Having the Conversation About Faith - for those of any religion and none - had been in my mind for a while as an alternative to former Lenten talks. I didn't have the minimum six to begin and cancelled. But then some of my local community approached me and suggested we'd run it a neighbours' house. It was thought there were others who'd like to come along.

There were nine there the first night and fourteen at the sixth and final night.It became evident the Conversation itself was as important as the topic and that the poems added an essential dimension, centering and returning us to layers and places within ourselves.Talking about symbols chosen initially led to Dried Feathers on Bone, a poem I included in Fear Knot (Doire, 2013).

There were people who knew a lot more about poetry than I do and others who have little exposure to it. A confidential questionnaire at the end demonstrated how much the participants valued the experience. So we did it again in the Autumn for six weeks and raised some money for the Galway Hospice. We looked at each poem, asking only what it suggested to each of us at this time and kept away - at first anyway - from an aesthetic analysis. That time we took as our starting point Having the Conversation - Continuing in Confusion and talked about the value of confusion as well as how confusing it can be to sit in the middle of it!

I thought it was time to stop while ahead but then, one of the members said - as we put down our final coffee cup (yes, there was tea/coffee afterwards for those who chose to stay and more did as time went on) he thought I might consider a Conversation About Beauty, Its Possible Obligations and I was hooked.

So next Monday evening 12 (so far) of us will sit down to talk about beauty. We'll start with Keats, definitely include some Contemporary work - we've read Carol Ann Duffy, Blake, Vaughan, & Heaney. Theo Dorgan's book of Uncommon Prayer was a good resource and we've looked at Millar duMars The God Thing. We've visited with Zbigniew Herbert, Milosz, Denis O'Driscoll and lots of Mary Oliver - and wander where the conversation and poems elicited bring us.

My local community are responsible for encouraging me to continue.Thanks to them I've had a wonderful chance to pilot a project I  hope to continue elsewhere.It has enabled me find a new way of drawing on my thirty years of group and workshop facilitation and include it with my new interest - poetry.

Contact information and further relevant details below.

POETRY READINGS

& WORKSHOPS

with Susan Lindsay

WORKSHOPS

Having a Different Conversation – About … 

Susan Lindsay is available to facilitate conversations mediated

by poetry, on particular topics. The extra dimension poetry

brings has become as much valued for itself as for what it

contributes to the conversation in these facilitated workshops.

It brings new perspective to a topic, a holding ground for 

the discussion, with the added benefit of providing a way into

discovering  poetry or a way into further enjoying it with others.

No previous experience of poetry, or the topic under discussion,

is needed. About - Faith, for those of any, or no, religion and

About - Continuing in Confusion have been recent workshop

titles. ‘... Conversation – About Beauty,its Possible Obligations 

is mooted for the future.

READINGS

Susan Lindsay is available to give readings from her books-

Fear knot (Doire Press, 2013)

Susan Lindsay’s poems are sometimes enigmatic, often startling. She is a poet acutely aware of the complexities of language, the levels of meaning a poem can have. When I read one of Susan Lindsay’s poems for the second time I always discover something quietly subversive lurking there which I missed first time around. Fear Knot is a daring collection of poems. A triumph.- Kevin Higgins

Whispering the Secrets (Doire Press, 2011)

The voice of experience wrought in lines that are lucid and direct…. this testimony of a survivor is suffused with joy and passion and a clear eyed appraisal of what it means to be mortal.

- Paula Meehan

…a book of courage and resolve. She writes of the “Fifth Province”, of confrontations and renewals, of dreams and shifting identities. … Lindsay writes poems of deep emotional control which communicate an affirmative celebratory mysticism. – Paul Perry

That was gorgeous. Beautiful writing. – RyanTubridy, 2005, The Tubridy Show, RTE Radio 1.

Susan Lindsay was born in 1950 and graduated from Trinity

College, Dublin in 1975. She followed a career in psychotherapy,

facilitation and as a consultant to organisations for thirty years.

Retired from psychotherapy, she is drawing on her former

experience to write and to facilitate workshops mediated by poetry

(such as the recently piloted Having a Different Conversation series),

as well as acting as a co-editor of Skylight 47, a biannual poetry

paper launched in association with the tenth anniversary of Over

the Edge Literary Events. In 2011 she was invited to read for

Poetry Ireland’s Introductions Series. Whispering the Secrets, her

Debut Collection of poetry, was published in 2011 by Doire Press

and a second collection Fear Knot in 2013.

Susan Lindsay Tel. 353 91 776881. 353 86 1671524. susanharrislindsay@gmail.com

savour / yellow cowslips...

The Trick Cyclist                                              

Wobbles/...hits the high wire/...

dismount to savour/

yellow cowslips

on the verge.

Full poem in Fear Knot  - click on cover right for direct link.

Philomena - the Bigger Picture. Martin Sixsmith - at Ennis Book Festival

Americans could pay more Irish to adopt children 

Sixty thousand children from mother and baby homes were ‘sold’ to the U.S. by Church and State. Fifty per cent more women died giving birth in those homes, than in the general population. One civil servant questioned the birth certificates being issued. One mother, in all that period, managed to get out with her baby and keep it. Following gasps of air sucked in or expelled, there is a profound silence in the auditorium of the Glor theatre in Ennis on Sat (8.3.2014) as Martin Sixsmith, who brought us the story that led to the film Philomena, tells the largely female audience the result of his continuing research for a forthcoming BBC documentary. I feel sick. The word slavery rises in my mind. It won’t go away. This is slavery.

Maybe the women were not owned but their incarceration was a form of slavery. 

Dublin’s Archbishop McQuaids’ influence, in particular, fueled the teaching that single pregnant women had sins to propitiate. (Many of the Nuns were victims of this misogyny too). Maybe the women were not actually owned, although one has to ask who ‘owned’ their children, and I don’t want to take away from the slavery of others who were owned, sold, chained and manacled by suggesting, that this too, is slavery. But if you have no way to get away, if you have to pay off the indenture of your pregnancy, birth and housing for self and baby by hard manual labour (because you can’t possibly raise that amount of money yourself), what else can it be called?

People come to believe the justifications their abusers insert in their minds.

The first aspect of slavery is ownership but the second, pervasive and enduring, is what happens in your head. It is when you come to believe you don’t have a right to a life of your own. Abusers, rapists and persecutors of all kinds tell themselves stories that justify their abuse. They develop a twisted perspective that their wrongdoing is ‘for the good of’ their victim and instill this deep into the consciousness of those they abuse who, literally, can’t defend themselves from this insertion because the invasion of their identity is so destroyed by the trauma they are enduring. They, then, come to believe that their abuse is due to their own fault! This is what abuse is. It is this belief, in the traumatised and in the perpetrators that has to be exorcised.

Perpetrators have to come to see the harm they've done before their cure can begin.

As with addicts, until perpetrators can genuinely acknowledge themselves the harm done, both to themselves and others no possible cure can begin. We have to get this corrosive perspective of sinfulness out of our heads and put right the continuing wrongdoing.

First steps to a world fit for their grandchildren: change the law and rid ourselves of corrosive attitudes

A first step is to change the law here to allow mothers and children seeking to find each other to do so. If Philomena and her sisters in motherhood lived in Northern Ireland this could happen because the updated laws make it possible. But we also need to challenge attitudes and delusions that ultimately lend support to perpetrators and misogyny. The women whose children were sent away should not have to carry this burden alone. The remnants of these corrosive attitudes need to be removed from Irish society and the ground harrowed to make it a better place for their grandchildren.  

FEAR KNOT

Fear is a strange thing. It can galvanise you into action, paralyse you – as the rabbit caught in headlights – or put you into denial so that you don’t even know that you are – afraid, that is.

Some years ago I wanted to explore the roots of the paralysis that can attack when action is needed, the kind that can lead to procrastination or a time of slowing down before important events, when speed would be a more helpful option. Brendan Kennelly had just published a book of poems exploring different emotions. I was about to commence a six months poetry course with Faber Academy, Dublin, under the tutelage of Paul Perry. It offered a space away from my usual poetry confreres, or maybe that should be ‘my consoeurs’! The anonymity of Dublin was to offer me a time to experiment further with poetry and push out the boundaries I’d reached in workshops with Kevin Higgins at the Galway Arts Centre. I wanted to see if I could swim in other waters.

 I’ll choose one emotion, I thought, fear could be good. Put it this way: next time I will be choosing joy! For I am not sure if the universe may offer up opportunities once we invoke a particular muse. I was presented with challenges that, for me, took me well into my chosen subject: fear of loss; of being ill; of dying; of being alone and of going mad. Nothing extreme then!

The core of all this is the fear of change. I’ve been exploring the question of change all my working life. Some people call psychotherapists ‘agents of change.’ Most of us want to reach a safe place where we need not fear any longer. We may then die of boredom but we don’t mostly have things remain static long enough to discover that. Stasis in biology comes close to being a definition of death, something that comes from stagnation. One quotation I came upon in my challenge to learn resilience said, ‘Give me a new challenge every day.’ ‘It was far from that I was raised,’ as they say, but I have come to see the value of it. The challenge to be creative is, literally, the gift of life. It was lucky, then, that I had poetry as a tool.

The poems are collected in Fear Knot, published by Doire Press, 2013. You can press on the Fear Knot cover  to the right of this blog to purchase a copy from Doire. I hope to talk about some of the poems in future blogs.

Seattle Launch for Over the Edge: The First Ten Years Anthology - Ed Susan Millar DuMars (Salmon, 2013)

Susan Millar DuMars has written a wonderful Introduction to this Anthology - to which I am a proud contributor. You'd want to read it for the prose in the Introduction alone! But also for the succinct history of an astounding series of readings, over ten years, that has had a regular attendance of around sixty at the monthly library readings - although Pat McMahon, the librarian, who retired last year says there were closer to 100 - he put the chairs away!

It begins, 'In 2003 my partner Kevin and I were living in a grotty upstairs flat in Salthill, Galway. Wood panelling prevailed. A coin-up electricity metre ticked off our minutes of space-heating, television, light. we could watch the undulations of Galway Bay from our front window - if we stood on the couch and squinted.'

Further on is the paragraph - 'At the end of 2002, the writer and storyteller Rab Fulton (founder of "MucMhor Dhubh", a monthly mini-mag that celebrated multiculturalism and the arts) complained to me that no one was giving unpublished writers a chance to read - to practice the art of presenting work, to try out their pieces before an audience. Most of the reading advertised smelled either of new money or of old, mildewed worthiness. I though about this lack a lot, and one winter's morning as I walked in to town I decided I could see how to challenge it. I phoned Kevin; by the time I'd made it into work, he and I had created the format for the Over the Edge Readings.'

 Eamon Wall - Poet and Smurfit-Stone Professor of Irish Studies as the University of Missouri, St .Louis has written: 'this anthology provides a generous selection of work and a lively introduction from Millar DuMars that locates the series within the contexts and histories of the Galway literary scene from the 1990's to the present.' His own book 'from the sin - e cafe tot he black hills, notes on the new irish' (The University of Wisconsin Press, 1999) has a comment from Eavan Boland on the back cover describing it as "A sparkling, engaging view of what it means to be an immigrant witness, to look at the United States through the eyes of a new population of Irish." It is interesting to see Over the Edge through the eyes of an emigrant Irish poet who returns regularly to the Irish scene. His book says, 'In recent times, (he is writing in 1999!) Irish publishers of poetry have received more generous government subsidies, and this extra funding has allowed them to take a more international view of poetry; for them, to bend Kavanagh's dictum, the new Irish view of poetry must be parochial and international'. Something the recent Ireland Professor of Poetry, Harry Clifton, addressed in his lectures and in an interview in Issue 1 of Skylight 47. This is a poetry magazine launched by Skylight Poets, a Thursday  afternoon Advanced Workshop with Kevin Higgins, to celebrate ten years of Over the Edge - under the co-editorship of Nicki Griffin, Kevin O'Shea and myself. It is mentioned, also, in Susan Millar DuMars' Introduction.

It is true I have a declared interest. But I doubt anyone buying the book from www.salmonpoetry.com or at the AWP  launch on Friday 28th February, 2014 @Salmon Poetry's Reception and Reading in the Sheraton Hotel, Seattle, 3rd Floor, will be disappointed. 'Over three hundred writers have read at Over the Edge. About two hundred were unpublished at the time.Over forty of these published books since.' You can read selections from their publication in this Anthology. It is a literary history of a particular moment in time in Galway. To have been fortunate enough to be able to avail of it has been a real privilege and an extraordinary opportunity. All who can get there are welcome at the launch.

Tonight Kevin Higgins's photo. Going 2014 Over The Edge Poetry Book Showcase at Nuns Island Theatre

I’m not sure about poems against Women Bishops – especially on Brigid’s Day!

Catching my breath after a first year of being involved in producing Skylight 47, I am very impressed – and not a little sorry - to see on his blog michaelfarry.blogspot.com/ that Michael Farry has retired from being Editor of Boyne Berries, having produced 15 Issues. He is succeeded by Orla Fay, also of the Boyne Writers Group. Congratulations Michael.

‘At the AGM the chair person, Paddy Smith, offered a challenge  to the group (BWG) worth keeping in mind, ‘Where are the poems about potholes on our roads or about what it’s like to be a member of the first human settlement on Mars or about the slow pace of funding for the arts in this country? (That latter issue, I’m convinced, is at the core of the recent controversy over Limerick City of Culture.)’ I couldn’t agree more. ‘Where is the material that deals with the taking over of the world by accountants? Or where’s the stuff that’s a lively commentary on RTE television programmes? Or that’s against Women Bishops! Depression and melancholy are not enough in our writing; we must be contrary too!’

Boyne Berries has been one of the first ports of call for new writers for all this time. I really appreciated having a poem published, getting to Trim to enjoy the launch of that issue and meeting other contributors and members of the Boyne Writer’s Group, of which Michael Farry is Secretary. The Boyne Berries Writers Group has an annual satire competition too, I see on the website Michael maintains. Kevin Higgins and all those in his Galway workshops who had a recent term or two on taking a satirical perspective, take note!
I met Michael at the workshop Alan Jude Moore held for authors selected for the Poetry Ireland

Introductions Series in 2011. He has been a generous supporter of our venture with Skylight 47, contributing poems and coming to readings and offering us a copy of his book, Asking for Directions (Doghouse, 2012) for Review. It was reviewed by Nicola Griffin who writes, ‘…this is a collection of precise language, never excitable but drenched in images that allow you to see the places and people of these stories, often quirky and sharp.’ She goes on to mention the humour in particular poems.

I wish you everything best in your retirement from being editor, Michael. I hope it means you’ll be able to visit our Galway events soon again. You are a historian as well as a poet. Can we expect a history of Boyne Berries? I’m now expecting a new book, or two – history and poetry, shortly. Hope so.

Poetry Reading - Tuesday 29th April 2014

Get Past the Fear of Poetry

I'm delighted to see my piece on getting over the fear of reading poetry, or writing it, now available on writing .ie

http://www.writing.ie/resources/get-past-the-fear-of-poetry-with-susan-lindsay/

Get Past the Fear of Poetry with Susan Lindsay

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