I Have My Ass Kicked at the Thirtieth Cuirt International Festival of Literature, Galway Ireland, 2015. Notes from an Apprentice Verse-Maker (2).

Mattie kisses me on both cheeks. There’s a jazz band playing. The boathouse doors open onto the terrace where people are talking their heads off in summer dresses and flowery tee shirts and a team of rowers are sculling the river behind them. We’re at the launch party for the thirtieth Cuirt International Festival of Literature. Perhaps the warmth of his greeting is in honour of the workshops I have on offer in the Cuirt Programme this year. While moving the black box that served as a stage, the year I read for Doire Press at the Cuirt Literary Brunch, Mattie told me that everyone contributing to Cuirt gets the same treatment from him. This is whether they are Seamus Heaney or are undertaking their first reading ever. It is ten years since I saw Mattie welcome Mr Heaney to Cuirt, on the steps of the Galway Town Hall theatre. That handshake made a lasting impression. It was the first time I’d seen the Nobel Laureate for literature, the first time I attended a literature festival. For five years of my move west to Galway I’d gauge my progress through greetings: first I knew no-one; then I could recognise people; then they’d recognise me. When I found myself being greeted on the street by people I didn’t yet know, I knew I’d finally arrived.

The Agency I’d set my sights on for my Memoir, the one that didn’t get short-listed for the competition - the deadline for which  I’d aimed it at last year, has written to say that although they like what I’ve written they just can’t see a large enough audience for it. They think it would appeal in particular to women in later life. But they do sweeten the pill with a comment that ‘this is nicer than that’ (a best-selling memoir I’d mentioned) and suggest submitting it to one particular publisher, giving me his e-mail address. That’s generous consideration. I push away the thought they are just letting me down gently. I am grateful.

Yet, what bigger audience could there be than women in later life? These are the women who fill book-clubs, provide theatres with at least sixty per cent of their audiences, who have always read – as distinct from surfed – books. They are keen to know about people of their age trying new things and to have a go at writing themselves - and they actually have a little more time now to read. Almost weekly, someone proclaims -in print or on air - that the ageing population is the fastest growing population in the Western world.  But, no doubt the Agent is right. The publishers they pitch to may be keen to target a younger audience, dare I say a more masculine audience? That last is unlikely. Does targeting a younger audience mean they have to neglect their long-term paying customers? It shouldn’t, but it may well be what’s happening. I’m glad I received the rejection notice while I can be distracted by the buzz of Cuirt and my big opportunity in this year’s festival – the chance to transfer skills from my former profession to augment my poetry writing by facilitating two workshops, Having a new Conversation – About Dreaming. The workshops use poetry as a springboard and container for conversations about particular topics.

The first workshop Conversation goes well. Returned questionnaires evaluating the event give further details – a few participants expected more on working with their dreams, either therapeutically or as writers. I’ve given up therapeutic work but I’ll include a poem likely to have been inspired by a dream in my Sunday workshop. How much time it gets will depend on the group. Regardless of having wished for a bit more of this or that, it seems the Tuesday participants at GMIT overall enjoyed their experience greatly. Inspired by encouraging questionnaire evidence I search my online documents, start editing and save the brochure I draft onto a memory stick I bring to the printers. As with so many requests printers suffer from receiving: I want copies yesterday. I’ve woken up to the value of designers though, so I pay the extra bit to have them work their magic. I place copies of the resultant flyers beside the till in Charlie Byrne’s bookstand at the Town Hall theatre.

Naomi Shihab Nye and Kay Ryan – both of whom have won myriad prestigious awards, while Kay Ryan was also United States Poet Laureate 2008-2010 - blow me away with their poems. I leave the theatre full – and inspired. I wish now that I hadn’t done anything as crass as having put out leaflets for possible festival organisers to pick up in the hope they might consider me for future events but I haven’t the courage to go and retrieve them.

I attend the workshop on Journalism -with a particular focus on interviewing - led by Olaf Tyaransen of Hotpress fame. It seems that the fact that a poet I interviewed for the poetry broadsheet Skylight 47 allowed me longer than the time ordained by her press agent was a good omen. Tyaransen says this can happen if you are lucky enough to be getting along with your interviewee, so it’s important to allow extra time for an interview in case you get lucky. Similarly, Sinead Gleeson, leading the Friday workshop, ‘A Guide to Working Freelance in Arts Media’ encourages me, with the news that the fact an editor of a newspaper gave me the word count he would want for a feature while turning down one of my submissions means he considered my work sufficiently promising to want more. She goes on to point out I should consistently follow up with offers of further submissions and ‘doggedly’ persist. His mail was received well over a year ago! However I have been getting the vital practice she urges us to get by continuing to write whether or not I submit or post the resultant articles. She believes that, contrary to pessimistic proclamations, there is still work for Freelance writers. A lot of pages have to be filled daily and editors are keen for new voices. She included radio in this. Turned down by an Agent? She suggests a particular London Agent for the next try ‘…and try publishers at the same time.’ She proffers the name of another one. We should write daily, ‘you’ll get better’, be blogging regularly. It’s no good having someone look at your blog and see that you haven’t written anything for a while. Ouch!

By dinnertime I’ve written the first draft of this blog to allow it a couple of days’ further consideration. I have been reminded that the real writing is the re-writing that will have to happen before I post it. As one participant said to two of us as we left the freelance writing workshop, ‘I’ve had my ass (usefully) kicked’. 

Free Teachers to Assess Students by Changing the Objectives We Judge Them By

      A facilitator is not a teacher but leads people to learn. The psychologist, Carl Rodgers dedicated his professional life to researching Communication. He once answered a question put to him by John Quinn, on RTE television, saying that despite the evidence for better alternatives teachers will   probably remain committed to the cup and jug method of pouring information into people. This happens largely because we are committed to ego and imparting accurate information lends credibility and a sense of importance. We feel more secure standing on a solid knowledge base. It leaves us more in control.

     It is unfortunate yet entirely understandable that teachers in Ireland this year are utterly opposed to the Minister of Education’s wish to have them assess their student’s work at Secondary (senior) school level for the state’s Junior Certificate. When the points system was introduced to ensure a fairer entry system to universities teachers were encouraged to move from enabling students to learn through exploration and enquiry to prioritising teaching them the answers that would best get them through the exam system and gain the most points. Students’ answers could be gauged against ‘ideal answers’ and points awarded according to the comparison.

      Accountability has become the buzz word in all fields of work in the recent years of economic cut-back. In education it has come to be measured in terms of performance, particularly if not exclusively, by exam results. This has also had unfortunate consequences for universities. It has been reported lecturers are concerned at the lower ability to think and the desire to be fed information found in recent cohorts of students.  A spirit of enquiry is essential for research – the ultimate raison d’etre for centres of learning and the thing that leads to the discovery of new information that leads to progress.  

     For teachers performance has become all about getting students through their exams. It requires a complete turnaround in attitude and job definition, if it is to become reasonable and satisfying for them to assess their students’ work. We continue to see the object of education in economic terms – exam results and expertise in subjects that will satisfy the needs of the economy - instead of enabling students to bring out the best of their selves, to learn all they can, to see learning as a skill they’ll use for the rest of their lives. We need to see education as preparing them to make their best contribution to the whole of society, as enabling them to ask awkward questions to ensure against the group think that most endangers the economy and society as a whole. Until we can do that, although entirely desirable, it is not a feasible option for teachers to assess those students. To do anything other than award their students top grades goes too far against the grain recently ingrained – the grain that has parents, teachers and all of us judge by the achievement of short-term goals with minimal regard for the greater picture.

     This is a pity. I imagine all of the Minister’s arguments in favour of on-going assessment and the fairness of ensuring students are no longer judged alone on one day performances in each subject are excellent and that teachers would wish they were free to see it that way. It would be best if they could take a lead in turning our short term educational goals around. I can’t imagine anyone involved with young people not wanting to reduce the stress of exam pressure, especially teachers.

    The ability to asses one’s own work and value the feed-back good continuing assessment offers is an essential life skill. Teachers and the Department of Education need to find a way to create an environment where the process can be valued by everyone involved, an environment that facilitates learning and the ability to learn and deliver results as distinct from one that measures output in terms of the expurgation of information imbibed through the anathema, and currently inevitable route, of rote learning.

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.