Katie Holten, Artist

First Published: The Irish Times, January 22, 2010

TWO YEARS AGO, in the middle of winter, Dublin-born artist Katie Holten spent weeks wandering along the four and a half miles of the Bronx’s Grand Concourse, looking for a way to make it speak. The Concourse, built in 1909 as a speedway out of Manhattan (and modelled on the Champs Élysées, no less), was approaching its centenary, and Holten, along with two other artists, was in the running for a commission to commemorate it through a public artwork. “I really didn’t think I had much chance of winning,” says Holten, “because the other two artists had really strong connections with the Bronx, and I’d been to the Bronx once, to a Yankees game.”

But Holten won the commission with her proposal for a “museum without walls”, comprising 100 street trees on a route through the Concourse, each tree linked to an audio recording of a Bronx tale, providing 100 invisible windows on to 100 vivid stories of a borough about which, too often, only grim stories are told.

John Corigliano, Composer

First Published: The Irish Times, October 20, 2009

WHEN JOHN CORIGLIANO’S opera The Ghosts of Versailles premiered at New York’s Metropolitan Opera just before Christmas 1991, it was immediately hailed as one of the major musical events not only of the year but of that still-young decade. The run sold out immediately. In the courtyards and foyers of the Met, opera lovers begged for tickets. In the box office, they drew up a waiting list. Inside the house from the first night on, reported the New York Times , “there was the kind of excitement rare at opera premieres.

Listeners walked up the aisles at the intermission discussing their favourite arias and ensembles”. It had arrived, said the critics; the great new American opera they had been waiting for, and it had come courtesy of a New Yorker, a Brooklynite, who had never written an opera before.

Mostly There Was Silence: Donald Hall, Poet

First Published: The Irish Times, Saturday, October 10, 2009

EARLY ON AN October Saturday the landscape around Eagle Pond Farm, near Wilmot in the state of New Hampshire, is astonishing to drive through. This is the famous New England fall in all its glory, and it is almost too beautiful for words. But only almost: “These colours were the most outrageous, crimson and bright orange and Chinese red. The birches turned russet, and the oaks a deeper brown-red. We floated on the bliss of the natural world.”

Those are the words of Donald Hall, poet laureate of the United States in 2006-7 and the author of 16 collections of poetry, as well as of several memoirs and essay collections. When Hall wrote those words, in his 2005 memoir The Best Day the Worst Day , he was recalling the first autumn he and his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, spent together at Eagle Pond Farm. That first fall of theirs was in 1975, when the couple, recently married, took leave of absence from their life in the academic and literary whirls of Ann Arbor, in Michigan, where Hall taught poetry at the university.

Never Ask Me Why: Paul Auster, Novelist

First Published: The Irish Times, Saturday, September 5, 2009

WELL, MR AUSTER. Tell me all about yourself.” Quite a way to start a conversation. But then, if you’re Samuel Beckett, you can probably get away with any conversation-starter you like. And it goes without saying that you can lean across the table to pilfer a cigarette from your new acquaintance – though, being Beckett, you’ll probably be polite enough to ask first. And never mind that you have a packet of your own – albeit cigarillos rather than cigarettes – on the table in front of you. Stolen smokes are sweeter by far.

Thirty-five years after he first met Samuel Beckett in a Paris cafe, Paul Auster has picked up a few of his ways. Novels narrated by obsessive men tripping over the perils of memory and through the trapdoors of language: yes. Monologues that pit consciousness against itself; those too. And even in Auster’s dark good looks – those intense eyes which have stared from the jackets of his books for some 30 years now – there is now a touch of those hawk-like Beckett features; at 62, grey-haired and high-browed, he looks just about ready for his close-up with John Minihan. And then there are the cigarillos. The air is struck with the smell of cigar smoke as Auster opens the door of his Brooklyn home, a beautiful brownstone in the writer-riddled neighborhood of Park Slope, where he and his wife, the novelist Siri Hustvedt, have lived since the 1980s.

Fugue at 59E59 Theaters next month

A new play I’ve been commissioned to write by Origin Theatre Company will open at 59E59 Theatres in New York next month as part of Origin’s 1st Irish festival. Fugue will play with four other monologues by Irish playwrights. Details here.

From the Lake: Garrison Keillor

First Published: The Irish Times, Saturday, July 25, 2009

IN THE ELEVATOR, I’m sceptical. He can’t always talk in that voice, can he? At 11am, in the middle of a busy two-day trip to New York, at the end of another long season of the radio show which requires him to riff and revel and recite in front of a live audience for two hours every Saturday night, and reportedly right up to the wire with the deadline for his latest novel, surely Garrison Keillor won’t really sound like . . . well, like Garrison Keillor? With that richest of radio voices, that voice that slides slow into the deepest of timbres, cushioning the consonants and drawling the vowels? I ring the doorbell. The steps that approach the apartment door are leisurely, almost ambling.

“Hello,” says Garrison Keillor, in Garrison Keillor’s voice, evoking the bullfrogs and cicadas and bumblebees of yet another quiet week in Lake Wobegon. It’s all I can do not to tell my ears how rude it is to stare.

Keillor, who will appear next month at the Kilkenny Arts Festival, spends part of his year in this Central Park West apartment, but mostly lives in St Paul, Minnesota, with his wife, Jenny Lind Nilsson, who is a violinist in the Minnesota Opera orchestra, and their young daughter (Keillor has been married three times, and also has a 40-year-old son from his first marriage).

He is most famous firstly for that voice, and secondly for that line. The words “It’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon” signal, each Saturday night, the beginning of the 20-minute monologue that is the adored centrepiece of A Prairie Home Companion , the live radio variety show written and hosted by Keillor since 1974. With this line, Keillor launches into the storytelling style that has become his signature over the past 35 years, a wandering through the anecdotes and the enigmas of everyday life in a small community that seems, on the surface, largely whimsical but which is sharpened with a wryness that allows little to escape its grip. The daily doings of the people of Lake Wobegon, a Minnesota town “out on the edge of the prairie”, become in themselves the edge from which Keillor casts smoothly off to reflections and recollections that reach from the quotidian towards the universal.

An Irishman in America: Colm Tóibín

 

First Published: The Irish Times, Saturday, April 25, 2009

IT’S SPRINGTIME in Brooklyn, in the old Italian neighbourhood of Cobble Hill. But suddenly it doesn’t feel like Brooklyn anymore; suddenly the air seems that of a small Irish town, of a small Irish sittingroom, where a small Irish boy sits at a card table with his sisters, aunts and neighbours and learns to play his hand.

Colm Tóibín, sitting at a cafe table on Smith Street, is talking about bridge. Not the bridge, the glinting marvel of stone and steel that soars out over the Hudson just blocks from here, but the card game, the game of chance and plotting and trick-taking, the game which, Tóibín has just announced, taught him more about writing novels than anything else. A moment ago, he was talking about the benefits of having to write long essays on literature and politics for publications such as the New York Review of Books; how the eye sharpens, how the mind gets a workout. And now, he says, it’s all really down to bridge. “It was the big training I got, intellectually,” he says. “It requires an enormous amount of planning and remembering.” Of long silences, working out what to do, working out when to yield. “It’s a way of thinking,” he says. “Of watching how the cards are distributed, of how to guess them. And for writing novels, that’s the skill you use.”

An Interview with Philip Schultz, Poet

 

First Published: The Irish Times, April 21, 2009

‘I ALWAYS ASSUMED that I was going to die around the same age as him,” says Philip Schultz of the father he lost almost 50 years ago. “I always thought of that age as some kind of milestone. And then, suddenly, I had lived beyond him.”

Schultz, now 64, still sounds surprised by this realisation. He recounts it slowly, even cautiously, as though its borders might have shifted since its last telling; as though he might find himself, suddenly, a week away from his 60th birthday again – but this time, like his father at that age, bankrupt, bewildered and in his death throes. As though he might feel, in the words of his poem, The One Truth, “his soul/ withering in his arms” as he lay in front of his son and his wife “without enough breath/ to say goodbye/ or even ask forgiveness”.

John Banville: The Art of Fiction, No. 200

 

 

My interview with John Banville, conducted on four occasions in Dublin between 2007 and 2008, has just been published in the Spring 2009 issue of The Paris Review. You can read an excerpt here.

DLR Poetry Now 2009

I loved every minute of this year’s DLR Poetry Now festival; the poets were terrific, the audiences were large and enthusiastic and frank, and our celebration of Seamus Heaney’s 70th Birthday was a joy to witness (I would say that, but lots of people who were there, including all our participating poets, have told me likewise). Here are some moments from, and coverage of, the festival:

The Irish Times created an online slideshow on our event for Seamus, in which you can see both the signed limited-edition broadsheet of “In the Attic” (one for everyone in the audience, as Gaybo would say) and the beautiful, specially commissioned painting by Hughie O’Donoghue, entitled The Inheritance, with which we surprised Seamus on the day. Thanks to photographers Bryan O’Brien and Matt Kavanagh for this. And thanks to Hughie for his painting.

Seamus Heaney following the celebration of his 70th Birthday at DLR Poetry Now International Poetry Festival, Dun Laoghaire, Dublin, 2009

 

 

RTE came along and covered the same event for their evening news, as did Fiona McCann from the Irish Times. 

Fiona McCann had also covered Robert Pinsky’s keynote address, The Fate of the Modern, and she wrote another piece later that week putting the premise of my own opening lecture very rigorously to the test.

Some great interviews with some of our participating poets, including keynote speaker Robert Pinsky, the young Belarusian poet Valzhyna Mort, and Ellen Hinsey, who read from her own work as well as along with Tomas Venclova as his translator from the Lithuanian.

 And Ian Duhig, interviewing himself, sort of…

Lastly, thanks to the bloggers: PJ Nolan and Miglior Acque, among others. 

(The photograph of Seamus was taken at his birthday dinner in Hartley’s by his fellow Derry poet, Colette Bryce.)