h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

...My sense of irony got a ticklin.

I have a certain fondness for the poet Patrick Kavanagh. He came from the townland of Iniskeen in county Monaghan. "My people knew his people", as we'd say here.

He's not a poet to *everyone's* taste. The metaphors he chooses are mostly rural ones, for example. And there was a certain anger in him. Maybe "anger" isn't really the right word: He depicted human beings with their greed, their nastiness, their downright stupidity sometimes, and after that said "Tch. Don't you love them?"

But nobody did a better line in bitterness than Kavanagh. He put grumpiness on a whole higher level - and sneakily I love him for it. He grew up in culchie-land, and became a sort of a self-taught poet. He read everything he could get his hands on and learnt how to versify and distinguish between his iambs and his pentameters. And he thought poets could never make it big in Monaghan, so he went off to the big smoke - Dublin.

Guess what? When he got there, he found all the same human frailties that he ran away from when he left "out the arse-end of the Ardee road in Monaghan". And he realised that poetry doesn't have to be about things found only in ancient Greece or Rome.

PK's not too popular in Ireland, because he was put on the school curriculum and became ubiquitous. And all too often, he got rammed into the heads of reluctant learners by people who didn't understand what he was saying. For example, his epic poem "The Great Hunger" is *not* about "an gorta mor", the potato famine. Metaphors, guys, metaphors.

You can probably find the man himself talking on youtube, talking about how poets are "born and not made", but how he was "made" as a poet after he came out of the hospital.

The ould guy must be turning in his grave to read about "The Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Weekend Workshop at the Patrick Kavanagh Centre in Iniskeen".


http://www.virtualwriter.net/vw_content.aspx?id=24516

Did he write 'On Raglan Road'? Now you've stuck me with that ballad.

He did, aye. He wasn't responsible for setting it to music though - that's somebody else's fault

That makes sense. It's a good poem.

This is one of my favourites:

http://homepage.eircom.net/~odyssey/Quotes/Written/Epic.html

It might help if you read that one out loud - listen to the rhyme between

...in Ballyrush and Gortin

and

...Gods make their own importance.

I like it.

Then there's the Van/Chieftans version, of course.

Yes. A good po-yet.

Do you know Norman McCaig?

I do, yeah - but not very well, I have to admit.

(And don't be making fun of Van. We need him now that we've realised that George Best is dead, Alex Higgins is dead, and the Titanic sunk. I love Van...and yes, I can see certain similarities between him and Kavanagh. )

Wasn't! I like Van! Much!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLCYH36ahpE

Oh Christ. That's how not to be a guest singer I guess. He's acting like he thinks he's something special.

Och, he serves a purpose. 'Never meet your heroes' they say.

Well Van's mission in life is to remind us not to have heroes in the first place. <smileY

Ah, here it is, I knew I had a Raglan Road journal somewhere.

I think I'm tripping lightly along the edge of the deep ravine. I see the danger, yet I walk...

It's a broken heart waiting to happen.

It's too late for good luck. It is just one of those situations I'm better at getting into than getting out of.

(By the way Dmitri, did you hear that Jim McCann (the singer) died last week?)

No, I didn't.

Post some Youtubes you like, and give us both a tribute and a treat.

And just pay more attention to the gf, and less to the poetry, like the poet said.