About ten years ago I attended a poetry reading, at a location I will not disclose here, in a vast hotel conference room. One of the poets was a nearly great poet, the other not so much. One was wearing a tweed jacket, or at least my memory chooses to dress them in tweed; the other was wearing a pair of curtains which I think my Mother would have liked for her big sitting room window. The room was full of people nodding gravely. A few of the audience were nodding off to sleep. Others were trying not to. It was a most worthy gathering, and I am grateful to the Irish government for paying my air fare and hotel bill. The poetry readings I have co-organised with my wife Susan via Over The Edge literary events in Galway for the past two decades are nothing like this. For several years we organised successful Friday night poetry readings in a wine bar above a cheese shop. The room, I’m reliably informed, smelled of sweaty cheese, a smell to which I think I must have become immune because I ceased to notice it. If our poetry readings don’t fill your nostrils with the smell of the bluer varieties of French cheeses, the fabulously uncomfortable plastic chairs in Westside Library, where we annually partner with Westside Arts Festival to organise Ireland’s largest literary open-mic, will at least make sure you stay awake. For many years we used to take visiting poets and writers to our local Turkish burger-and-kebab house after readings where I would usually dine on the most excellent curried chips. These days, for health reasons, I have to settle for Champagne and hors d’oeuvres at the House Hotel because the medication I am on for my dodgy lungs clashes unpleasantly with the cheaper varieties of food and alcohol. It’s a sacrifice. But one I’m prepared to make in the interests of literature. Now don’t get me wrong, while the poetry readings we organise do aim to at all times keep our audience awake, they are not pseudo-Beatnik amateur hour affairs which are all about the MC’s male member. We have had many leading Irish poets and fiction writers take part in our events: Medbh McGuckian, Denis O’Driscoll, Colette Bryce, Eamon Grennan, Ken Bruen, Claire Kilroy, and Kevin Barry to name just a few. The radical thing we do, though, which neither the pseudo-Beatniks nor the crowd in that aforementioned giant hotel conference room appear to be interested in, is we platform raw new writers alongside the very established. If Over The Edge was a religious rather than a literary movement, we would be some offshoot of the Quakers; everyone gets to have their moment, their say. The crowd nodding off to sleep in that hotel conference room full of tweed and carpets call to mind the Catholic Mass, with its absurd hierarchies, peculiar outfits, and me there in the midst of it all trying not to smirk. One of the featured readers at a recent Over The Edge: Open Reading is a young woman, just turned twenty, who first joined one of my poetry workshops four years ago while she was recovering from having deliberately jumped off a motorway bridge. She vanished for a bit after that term of workshops and then emailed me during the lockdown to ask if we could meet to discuss her poetry – she had been writing again, she said. I said of course, when the Covid restrictions allowed, we must meet for coffee and she must bring some copies of her new poems. She said this wouldn’t be possible as she was only allowed out of the psychiatric unit at University Hospital Galway, where she was detained having almost died of an eating disorder, for half an hour each day, and she was not allowed, by order of court, to leave the hospital grounds. All of this is in the public domain, and she has written about her experiences. I said I would come and meet her in the hospital grounds. We met, and sat on the grass outside the door of the psychiatric unit and discussed her new poems while two psychiatric nurses watched us from the door. One of the nurses said to her as I approached: “Yer man looks like a poet alright”. I gave her some editing suggestions and came up with a few places where she might submit her poems for publication. She was a featured reader alongside a poet who has published three collections, and did great. Everyone was talking about her reading afterwards. She read for the same fifteen minutes Denis O’Driscoll and Medbh McGuckian read for. Of course it is not because I am a good person that I organise literary readings. I do so because I am a poet myself. And also because I have a compulsive need to change things for what, I think, is the better. Many poets who go into organising/“curating” events or become publishers tend in time to cease to really be active poets. I knew I had avoided this fate, and made it as a poet when, in 2013, I gave a reading on the floor of the AWP Conference in Boston; then headed to Amherst, Massachusetts to do another reading there. While in Amherst I rather embarrassingly developed a pretty grossly distended testicle, which was an offshoot of a kidney infection I got because of the autoimmune disease I am beset with. I carried my swollen testicle onto a bus from Amherst to Springfield, Massachusetts then onto another bus to Boston and then put it on a plane to Dublin, along of course with the rest of me. Back in Galway, having visited a doctor and shown her the nature of my problem, I then did another poetry reading that evening, as I was scheduled to do, and then immediately took my testicle home to rest
