It is said of the city of Dublin that you cannot lob a brick in the place without braining some class of a poet, and while this provides further inducement, if any were needed, to get the old throwing arm back in shape, it also has incidental cultural implications for Ireland’s capital. A city whose poet population has been allowed to fester unchecked must naturally suffer the effects of such negligence, and first among these is a dearth of actual poetry. It may seem odd to attribute the deficit of poetry to the surfeit of poets but in a garden overrun by weeds, what hope is there for more rarefied flowers to grow? In a city whose populace spends a good deal of its employers’ time congratulating itself on a colourful turn of phrase, who will take the time and who will develop the capacity to recognise among all the distractions that strong true note of our old friend Poesy? This answer to this question is Gerry McNamara. Mike Igoe would also have been acceptable.

For the last four years, for no visible reward and for reasons the rational observer can only guess at, Gerry McNamara has hosted the open mic poetry night Write and Recite. Write and Recite had a difficult birth, arse first out of an evening called Poets Anonymous. Poets Anonymous was inclusive, supportive and tolerant of nearly every form of horrible doggerel that could be excreted onto it by the citizens of a town not short of horrible doggerel. This was its strength. Moustachioed working men told ballads of social injustice and wistful housewives rang rhymes of springtime splendour and students in velvet jackets channelled the spirits of Yeats’s less talented friends. It provided the opportunity to the nearly talented and the nearly talentless alike to sing their souls in a non-threatening environment, and you occasionally got to hear some good stuff too.

What Poets Anonymous didn’t like, however, was mouthiness and what it really couldn’t stand was the word “fuck”. And in a city where, perhaps even more than most, poetry and drinking are constantly renewing their marriage vows (if I have neglected to mention that Write and Recite took place exclusively in pubs, that’s because it would be like writing on the Madagascan rainbow fish and forgetting to say that it tends to favour moist conditions) the poetical impresario cannot afford to get too precious about the word “fuck”. Anyway, a division arose between the fucks and the fuck-nots and the division became a schism and from this schism Write and Recite was born like a foul-mouthed amoeba from its parent cell.

It is partly for this reason that Write and Recite had the privilege of considering itself the bad boy of Dublin poetry evenings, which is almost as pathetic as it sounds. However, it also means that the evening – which did, for better or for worse, become the single longest-running poetry night in the city – retained through the years of its existence a kind of defiant vitality which I have not found anywhere else.

This is down to Gerry, a man in his early forties who favours denim, straggly grey hair, and unfashionably large spectacles. Gerry has been variously a drummer, a martial artist and a janitor, and his mid-period classic Cunt was seminal (if that’s not mixing metaphors) in the revolutionary split from Poets Anonymous. It is neither necessary nor desirable to quote from Cunt, but certain clues in the title should be enough for the discerning reader to indicate its general tone and content.

Write and Recite developed, then, as a free-spirited rather masculine arena for poetic expression. Heckling was not so much encouraged as assumed to be the proper response to most poetry and this gave to the evening meetings a kind of raucous freedom that was beneficial to some poets and not to others. A certain robustness of delivery was necessary to survive the evening which usually culminated in Gerry’s famous Five Word Slam©, where participating poets had the duration of a pint- or cigarette- break to compose some lines using five words suggested by the audience. The results of the competition were compromised by the tendency of audiences to throw up the same words week after week (“nipple” was a particular favourite), but as an exercise in more or less ex tempore composition it was very valuable not only as a sort of leveller by which the audience could gauge the respective skills of very different poets, but also for the poets themselves as a way to hone their skills and earn sex toys, which were usually the prizes on offer.

Write and Recite suffered from being dominated by men. The spirits of the Kavanagh and Behan are constantly invoked, less for their literary output, it is sometimes tempting to conclude, than for their alcoholism. It is true that for a period of a few months a series of pretty young American students of literature were lured into the various dives in which the evening was held, aglow with some romantic anthropological dream of cultural authenticity, and it is also true that some of us even managed to get off with one or two of them. For the most part, however, the behaviour of Write and Recite’s regulars has acted as a pretty effective safeguard against the intrusion of soppy girls.

And it is the behaviour of the poets that has sadly overshadowed their work. There are several genuinely talented poets who attended regularly—Eamonn Lynskey, nominated for the Hennessy new writers award, is a credit to the place; Noel Sweeney has recently represented Leinster in the BBC Radio 4 poetry slam competition; Nicholas “Birch” Jackman has been engaged to read at the Electric Picnic music festival—but sadly the accomplishments of these men, literary and otherwise, has tended to be overshadowed by the reputation acquired by Write and Recite for being what amounts to a shower of drunken messers, more interested in slagging each other off and terrorising women than in actually producing good work. So it was sad when Gerry McNamara decided to bow out of Write and Recite. He asserted that “personal problems” made it impossible to continue running the night, and he had the good grace not to mention that it was other people’s personal problems.

A more recent development in Dublin, and a haven for Write and Recite people who are jonesing for a bit of poetry, has been Mike Igoe’s Naked Lunch, which takes place in Carnival on Wexford St and which—unlike Write and Recite—has not yet even once been forced to relocate due to the bad behaviour of its regulars. The Carnival night is still new and offers, from the poet’s perspective, rather too much guitar-based angst than one might hope for, but Mike Igoe is young, talented and energetic and, since the demise of Write and Recite, his regular fortnightly session is the only regular forum for poetry in town.

There are others, of course. The Monster Truck Gallery on Francis St hosted a series of really lively evenings last summer and there are plans for another series soon; Bowe’s and Chaplin’s have hosted nights on and off and P. J. Brady’s annual Kavanagh night in The Palace on Fleet St can claim to be the highlight of the year for many poets about town. None of these nights, though, has any but the most cursory acknowledgement from Poetry Ireland, the government-funded body in charge of supporting poetry in Ireland.

This is hardly surprising when you meet the sort of delegation charged by these poets of the street to extract money from the government, but it is one of the greatest frustrations about poetry in this city that it tends to be either absurdly rowdy or stiflingly dry. There is no shortage of button-holers in pubs only too eager to spew their creations at you, and you will have no difficulty finding a room in a library where a polite gathering of poetry-lovers spend a pleasant hour trying not to cough too audibly on the dust that whispers from the reader’s mouth. (The distinction between the types of poetry available is one of atmosphere rather than quality; in both camps the overall experience is like trying to find a few plump raisins in a bowl of rabbit-droppings, but this is normal, I think.) It is rare, however, to find a forum where the general merriment of the drunken idiots meets the intellectual rigour of the dried-up academics; but it is not impossible.

The poet Orla Martin (of the Galway Martins) has successfully managed to keep a foot in both camps. As an attractive woman she is something of a rarity among the circles whose members constituted the hard core of Write and Recite, and she is also recognised by Poetry Ireland, having had her official “Introduction” from them a couple of years ago. She attends a poetry group by and for intelligent well-behaved people but has also been known to consort with the messers at Carnival. (Martin has admitted that she considers her Rathmines group as a kind of wronged wife and her Carnival crowd as her mistress...) Anyway, for whatever reason (possibly something to do with her having a real job, but this is speculation), Orla Martin has managed to reconcile two factions of Dublin poetry that have hitherto been irreconcilable. She has run two nights in the Winding Stair (it used to be a bookshop and café, now it’s a restaurant with some old books smelling of soup left around to add a bit of class, but there’s still a separate bookshop downstairs) where both the cream and the dregs of Dublin poetry have met and goggled at each other uncomprehendingly over a lot of wine. The last night out was successful combination of formal academic-style poetry and more free-style street ranting, comic children’s verse, song and even a dramatic monologue (from O’Casey). With both ages and all sexes represented, the disreputable element managed to behave itself and the other side seemed to have actual fun, no small achievement at a poetry night.

It is to be hoped that Orla Martin will continue with this success, but it will require grit, determination and almost superhuman patience. Ask poor Gerry McNamara.

Here are a few bits of verse that were produced at Write and Recite mentioned in the article. These were composed in the 15- to 20-minute break given for Gerry McNamara's 5-Word Slam,and they are included as examples of the sort of stuff I produced at these evenings. They won variously, some shot glasses, a shoe-tree, a passport cover and a sex toy of some description...

Instant Ballade

(from the slam at the Left Bank, 16th August, 2005)

The disco ball is flinging star on star
   On teetering walls in whirling mirrored rays;
They flood the pub and whizz about the bar
   To catch the pins and studs of waifs and strays.
   My eyes are yellowish like mayonnaise,
My brain is numb but I have no complaint;
   I sit or stagger with enraptured gaze
If this is a church then I must be a saint.

I don’t know if my friends are near or far.
   The room is spinning in a sort of haze.
It doesn’t really matter where they are;
   I’m talking to myself a lot these days.
   My voice is high in ecstasy of praise.
No company nor sound or light can taint
   The moment when the stars start to amaze.
If this is church, then I must be a saint.

I only came in here to have a jar
   But someone gave me something and my ways
Career on a floor both slippery and like tar,
   Nothing is steady, nothing steady stays.
   The Reaper smokes a cigarette and flays
My mind of fear for all is bright and quaint.
   His friendly smile is peace, his wink conveys
That this is church and I must be a saint.

(Our five words were: star, mayonnaise, reaper, cigarette, saint.)

~~~~~

Instant poem: 25th April, 2006

What is elegant is imaginary
And what is fruitful lacks a certain grace;
The obscene blush of peach and raspberry
Is lurching hips and screwing up of face.
The sky sweats sunlight, tacky and obscene
And bleeds its sticky syrup on the sea,
It cloys and clogs the views that once were keen
And succulence congeals in you and me.
Though, in the lofty breath of sparer sky,
The strains of light are finely spun and pure,
The purity corrupts and you and I
Only in spine and sweat are ever sure
That strangers’ pulse and breath are really sweet
And mind submits to soul and nerve to meat.

(The words were: elegant, raspberry, fruitful, stranger, sky

~~~~~

Instant Poem, Westmoreland, March

Only when the moon begins to liquefy
Does syzygy suck the sea’s black jelly from the caves,
And only when the melancholy oceans dignify
Our pulse in cowering phlegm-flecked foam on waves;
And sharks are liquorice and bears are gummy
And bored blood-mouthed tigers turn to marmalade,
And we seek light from deep in mummy’s tummy
Or flee from cancer in a cavern’s shade
Do we feel awe. It’s fear that makes us love;
It’s death that makes us dance in time to our hearts’ cease;
It’s oblivion drives our arms thrown high above
Heads that exist only in their own release.
What makes the wind into a frightened child
Makes gods of babies and thought into something wild.

(Our five words were: jelly, bored, melancholy, syzygy (Linda’s suggestion), marmalade.)