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New York’s Irish Arts Center celebrates the beauty of poetry

By
CAHIR O'DOHERTY
,
Irish Voice Reporter

Published Wednesday, November 11, 2009, 5:12 PM
Updated Wednesday, November 11, 2009, 5:30 PM

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New York’s Irish Arts Center celebrates the beauty of poetry | Entertainment in Ireland and Around the World | IrishCentral




Read more: Culture and Lifestyle, Irish Culture, Media, Poetry, Irish Arts Center
Pictured at the first Irish Arts Center Poetry Festival are poets Peter Sirr, Enda Wyley, and Joseph Woods; co-curator Aengus Woods, executive director Aidan Connolly, co-curator Belinda McKeon and poets Paula Meehan, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain and Harry Clifton

The Irish Arts Center’s inaugural Irish Poetry Festival was a standing room only event last Saturday in New York, proving that the demand for a forum for Irish verse is as strong as ever.

Six contemporary Irish poets gave spirited readings, signed books and then met with the public in an event that ran so smoothly and was so warmly received that the only wonder is that this was its first ever outing.

Like so many of the very best arts initiatives, the Irish Arts Center’s Poetry Fest had its origin as a conversation between two arts professionals in 2008, playwright and journalist Belinda McKeon and Aidan Connolly, the executive director of the Irish Arts Center.

McKeon, whose most recent play “Fugue” was part of September’s 1st Irish Theatre Festival, curates the annual Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown Poetry Now Festival in Dublin and was a natural choice to lead the initiative, approaching the job with an already established list of contacts in contemporary Irish poetry.

Connolly immediately knew that the Irish Arts Center would be an ideal venue for a new poetry festival, and understood that the center’s discerning audience would welcome a deeper literary engagement with Irish culture. It would be a surefire success, he believed.

With the idea for the project approved McKeon was soon joined by co-curator and well-known Irish writer and academic Aengus Woods, and with sponsorship from NYU’s Glucksman Ireland House, Culture Ireland and the Poetry Society of America a fully-fledged festival was born.

The poem and the spoken word have been central to Irish culture for millennia, and that’s a powerful rejoinder to a world that nowadays thinks in sound bites and bottom lines, without pausing to reflect on the lines preceding and following.

In many ways curating a fledgling poetry festival is a courageous thing to do because it’s the poor relation, the least funded of all the art forms, the hardest to bring to the public and the most commonly overlooked, as fewer people actually buy poetry nowadays.

Yet Irish poetry has remained vital, some might say the most vital of all the forms of contemporary Irish literature, and the readings at the Arts Center on Saturday confirmed it.

Featuring poets who exemplify this notion, the curators wisely selected Harry Clifton, Eileen Ni Chuilleanain, Paula Meehan, Peter Sirr, and Enda Wyley, each of whom represent and simultaneously break with perceived notions about Irish literary traditions, making for lively readings. 

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New York’s Irish Arts Center celebrates the beauty of poetry | Entertainment in Ireland and Around the World | IrishCentral


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