English Language Poets in University College Cork, 1970–1980

English Language Poets in University College Cork, 1970–1980 Clíona Ní Ríordáin English Language Poets in University College Cork, 1970–1980 Clíona Ní Ríordáin Institut du Monde Anglophone Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3 Paris, France ISBN 978-3-030-38572-9 ISBN 978-3-030-38573-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38573-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland I ndil cuimhne Tomás Ó Ríordáin Foreword Opening my advance copy of this book on my computer, I was caught by a fragrance reaching me—not from the decade that is its subject—but from the early 1960s, from my own undergraduate years in University College Cork. A delightful time, a moment of freedom to discover people and ideas that were contemporary, with eccentric but mostly benevolent teachers to look after the past centuries—I have never learned so much or so fast, about life, art and philosophy, as I did then in a small, provincial, traditional college, in a provincial city. Of course that whiff is the fragrance of youth, but not only—the city had a musical, theatrical, cin- ematic and artistic culture of the kind that flourishes in places where the whole audience moves in a body from play to concert, cinema to gallery; and the university drew on a large province, for which it was still a true centre for commerce, culture and education. Of the five years I spent as a student, what I remember most vividly is the sense of a cohort, of a group of people thinking, arguing, reading and discovering life, together. But Clíona Ní Ríordáin’s book makes me ask, what was missing? Lit- erary culture was lopsided. Although Cork had produced notable writers who were still alive and writing, notably Seán O’Faoláin, who had chal- lenged the narrowness of the national debate by founding The Bell in the 1940s, much of their work was officially unavailable. Censorship was active and especially directed at fiction by Irish authors. There was a Film Festival where we saw uncensored European films, but no Book Festival to bring us The Golden Ass or The Well of Loneliness. Although (of course) vii viii FOREWORD we procured and read the banned books, native and foreign, we were also absorbing the message that literature and the state were at odds. And poetry, though (again of course) we were reading poetry, seemed remote from the place and time we were living in. Something that for the almost- clandestine poet I then was gave a feeling of unreality to the pursuit. So that it was an apocalyptic moment when a newly appointed lecturer, Seán Lucy, read the poems of the emigré Corkman Patrick Galvin to a student society—I can still hear his slightly Anglo voice almost possessed by the rhythmic violence of Galvin’s ‘The Kings are out’: With knives of ice Anddressedtokill The wine flows down from Summer Hill Christ! Be on your guard tonight The Kings are out …1 Galvin was to stay abroad for almost another decade but the unmistake- able voice continued to be accessible in the broadsheets and pamphlets that occasionally erupted from his English base. I left Cork for Oxford and then Trinity College Dublin. I went on writing, and presently published poetry in Dublin, returning to see family and friends—and then in the early seventies I happened into a student event, the launch of the Irish-language journal INNTI, that showed how much things had changed in the College. Poetry was not just visible, rooted in the place and the voices of the students who were writing, it was unapologetically in print and challenging a national readership. Older poets in English and Irish, Seán Ó Ríordáin, Máirtín Ó Direáin, Pearse Hutchinson, were there to validate a student enterprise. The phenomenon of INNTI has been widely commented on; now Clíona Ní Ríordáin (who is among those who have written on that group of poets) turns her attention to the English-language strand of poetry writing that surfaced at UCC in the same period. The two lines are entangled, some poets writing in both languages, and it must be that the simultaneous presence on the campus of two writers whose verse was cele- brated in Irish and English, respectively, Ó Ríordáin and John Montague, helped to precipitate that sense of possibility, that made people identify themselves as poets. Ní Ríordáin’s study draws on Karl Mannheim’s concept of a “generation” and points to the introduction of free secondary education in the FOREWORD ix Republic by Donogh O’Malley at the end of the sixties as the public event that gave young people in Munster permission to develop their imagina- tions in new ways. I’d suggest that the rapid withering away of censorship after 1967 (when a new Act liberated a huge backlog of previously banned books) must have added to the sense of freedom. But her focus on an educational centre and on the impact of some exemplary teachers is both just and a corrective to the widespread emphasis on individual talent as the sole source of poetry. But John Montague’s influence was decisive. He was ten years younger than the agonising bachelor Ó Ríordáin; he was embarking on his second marriage; he was professional and international in his approach. Thomas McCarthy is quoted: “New collections of poetry came our way, our attention was drawn to reviews. We were made familiar with the activities that are the norm in a literary life”. McCarthy, the late Seán Dunne, Greg Delanty, Theo Dorgan, Gerry Murphy, Maurice Riordan and the late Gregory O’Donoghue, all born in the 1950s and all undergraduates in the 1970s, went on to make a mark as poets, widely various in style but all engaged in the life of poetry in their country and abroad. The progres- sion happened “in due course”, if at uneven pace; the absence of women from the procession has been remarked. The mutual support of a cohort seems to have been lacking; female poets were perhaps still moving to a different time signature. Clíona Ní Ríordáin comments on the poetry of this “generation” with perceptive enthusiasm, showing also how by retrieving, collecting and republishing the poems of Patrick Galvin they constructed a forebear for themselves. She pays due tribute to Seán Lucy who as Professor of English welcomed Montague to the College, and to his student, the academic, novelist in Irish and English, and poet of Cork’s southside, Robert Welch, who was born in the late 1940s, left Cork by 1970, but remained attached to the tradition, co-editing the Galvin volume. An important fea- ture is her analysis of other publishing projects, the anthologies including Seán Dunne’s Poets of Munster, Greg Delanty and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s Jumping off Shadows‚ and Seán Lucy’s Five Irish Poets published in Cork in 1970 by the local Mercier Press. Those titles tell us something about a national (and international) back- ground. From the mid-1960s onward, the notion of “Ulster poetry” as possessing a claim to be on the one hand the Irish poetry best worth attending to—and on the other hand not quite Irish at all—was made in certain quarters on the back of the appearance of a bunch of major talents x FOREWORD in the North. The cultural-geographic-political assertion drew responses both inside and outside Ulster, and the notion of Munster as an equiva- lent cultural entity was canvassed. Lucy, on the other hand, was implicitly claiming that his five Cork poets have as good a right to claim a central role as poets based in or published in Dublin. All of this academic, cultural and literary context is visible in the published books, the obituaries and library catalogues. Ní Ríordáin has gone deeper: into the archives of the student journal The Quarryman, into interviews and memoirs, and into the social history of the city. This is, in her telling, a closely woven story where trade unionists like Michael O’Riordan, journalists like the late Robert O’Donoghue, friend of Galvin and father of Greg, ancestral figures like “Father Prout” (Francis Sylvester Mahony, author of “The Bells of Shandon” and much else), musicians like Aloys Fleischmann, Geraldine Neeson, circle around each other.

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