Poetry and music performed in Galway City Library during "April is Poetry Month" in 2009.
A radical event at the library!
The young woman finds the poem she wants to read in The Oxford Book of American Verse. Published in 1952, this book of over 1,000 pages by 49 poets has been on the shelves of the Galway City Library for all of 50 years.
She is a light speaker, and you cant hear her very clearly, as she stands at the public podium in the library and reads a poem by Wallace Stevens.
At the beginning it seems she is talking about snow, snow at the end of winter, when afternoons return. And then she seems to say: one desires so much more than that. She continues in a voice that seems so faraway and faint: I made it fresh in a world of white. And then with a quiet urgency she conveys Stevens's words that still one would want more, one would need more.
Next she is challenging us with Stevenss words about the never resting mind. She has taken the poem out of the book and given it life, breathed fresh life into it on this lunch-time April Thursday.
She continues: the imperfect is our paradise. Did we hear that clearly, did she say that? After all these years of competitiveness, of Celtic Tiger philosophy, after 10 years of business news on RTE Radio which kept reporting greater profits every morning, did Wallace Stevens have a message resting on the shelves of the City Library telling us that the imperfect is our paradise. This tall young student of anthropology from Cornell University here at the poetry podium in the city library, goes on, now in an insistent tone, that the imperfect is so hot in us.
She reads the poem with a gentle striving, a striving for the understanding of human nature.She has taken the poem out of the book and given it life, uttering the words with a cadence and a phrasing which one might not always notice on the page.
In these so-called recessionary times, one feels that this poem is giving us ideas on how to live.
The poet Wallace Stevens loved New York and died there in 1955, and today this young New York student has arrived unexpectedly here to Galway City Library to read and reveal his words.
That is why we have a public library service. A place in which there is solace and resistance, a place which provides for another and different way of thinking.
The Cúirt Festival of Literature was on that week, and some great poets and writers came to Galway, giving life to some of their poems and stories on the stage of the Town Hall Theatre. When some great, and perhaps obscure, poets comes to a literary festival near you, then go there. Go along to hear some of them, even if you have never been to a poetry reading before. You have a right to be there. We want more, one would need more, and Cúirt and other such festivals provide it.And if you are put off by the word 'literary,' and by the social trappings and posings which unfortunately these literary festivals sometimes take on, then you will have been short-changed. It is such a shame that poetry does not reach a wider, more general audience than it usually commands.
One of the poets on stage at Cúirt this year was Jane Hirshfield, yet another New York City born writer. She told us that "a good poem shocks us awake, one way or another - through its beauty, its insight, its music, it shakes or seduces the reader out of the common gaze and into a genuine looking. And make no mistake she says, I consider such a moment of transformation a radical event."
The poem is 'The poems of our climate' by Wallace Stevens.
The second piece is a tune called 'Duluth' which was written by Trampled by Turtles
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Fantastic.
missoulaglory 2 years ago
very nice cover of Duluth....I was wondering if there was any way to get the chords for this, I would love to play it
EricKate0107 2 years ago