As the translator scuttles back and forth between the original and the rendering, or engages in dialogue with a co-translator, a kind of “assimilative space” opens up, in which “influence” may be less contrived and literary than when drawing upon masters in one’s own language. Before considering why this may be so, I want to propose a key difference between a poet translating a poet and a scholar translating a poet.

While both engage the myth of Prometheus, seeking to steal some fire from one of the gods to bestow on readers, the poet is also involved in a sub-plot that may, as it were, chain him to a wall. Besides making an offering to the reader, the poet-translator is also making an offering to himself – he is stealing fire for his own furnaces at the risk of being overwhelmed – stalemated – by the power he has inducted into his own workings.

Influence through translation is different from influence through reading masters in one’s own tongue. If I am being influenced by Wallace Stevens, say, his American is coming directly into my own. You might read my poem and think of Stevens. In the case of translation, I am creating or co-creating an American version out of – in the case of Vallejo – a Spanish text, and if Vallejo is to enter my own poetry he must do so via what I have already, as a translator, turned him into. This is, in the long run, very close to being influenced by myself, or by a self I have created to mine.

While I have thought more about poetry while translating César Vallejo than while reading anyone else, I do not feel that my poetry reflects Vallejo’s. He taught me that ambivalence and contradiction are facets of metaphoric probing, and he gave me permission to try anything in my quest for an authentic alternative world in poetry.

When I speak of creating an American version out of a Spanish text, I do not want to imply that I think of myself as writing my own poem in the act of translating or cotranslating Vallejo – or to put it more vividly, à la Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” writing my own sentence in the back of a victimized text. I do not believe in so-called “free translations,” Robert Lowell’s “Imitations” or homophonic translations (with the exception of the Zukofskys’ rendering of Catullus). I see the poet-translator as being in the service of the original, not attempting to improve on it or to outwit it.

By adding to, subtracting from, and/or re-phrasing the original, the translator implies that he knows more than the original text does, that, in effect, his mind is superior to its mind. The “native” text becomes raw material for the colonizer-translator to educate and to re-form in a way that ends up instructing the reader to believe that the foreign poet is aping our literary conventions.

All translations are, in varying degrees, specters or emanations. Spectral translations haunt us with the loss of the original; before them, facing the translator’s inabilities or hubris, we feel that the original has been sucked into a smaller, less effective size. Like ghosts, such translations painfully remind us to what extent the dead are absent. Emanational translations, on the other hand, are what can be made of the original poet’s vision; while they are seldom more potent than their prototypes, good ones hold their own against the prototype and they bring it across as an injection of fresh poetic character into the literature of the second language.

While I am primarily a poet, I have worked as a translator and as a co-translator. In both situations I have encountered problems and successes. I began to work on Vallejo in Kyoto, Japan, in 1962, when my self-taught Spanish was inadequate to his complexity. Over the next few years, I bounced from one Latin American helper to the next, being mislead as often as I was helped by native speakers who were generally stumped as I was by Vallejo’s arcane, figurative language. The situation was even more complicated because all of the editions of the Poemas humanos I was using contained typos, erroneous stanza breaks, and missing lines. So I hitchhiked, bused, and flew from Indianapolis to Lima, Peru, where the Vallejo widow lived, in 1965, hoping to get access to Vallejo’s typescript. The French Georgette Vallejo turned out to be demented and very manipulative, with a nasty ambivalence toward her late husband’s art. She refused to show me the typescript and also refused to give me permission to publish my translations on the basis that no one could translate Vallejo (she was then, it turned out, in the process of preparing a “selected poems” of Vallejo’s in French). Via some wily action that I will not go into here, I completed the translation on my own once back in the States and Grove Press brought it out in 1968.

In the early 1970s, I showed this bilingual edition to José Rubia Barcia, a Spanish essayist teaching at UCLA. He told me what I feared was true: it was not a bad job on a killer of a book, but it could be done better and, if I wanted him to, he would revise it with me. José and I spent the next three years, putting in around 20 hours a week, reworking every poem in the collection. By this time the dreadful widow had sold Vallejo’s typescripts to a Lima publisher who brought out a facsimile edition of them, enabling us to work with an accurate text. University of California Press brought out our collaboration as César Vallejo: The Complete Posthumous Poetry in 1978.

In the late 1980s. I teamed up with the Peruvian poet and scholar Julio Ortega to translate Vallejo’s Trilce, a much more difficult job than the Poemas humanos. Ortega quit after six months and for the next two years I worked on my own with some crucial research input from Américo Ferrari, a Vallejo scholar living in Geneva. My bilingual Trilce was published first by Marsilio in 1992; Wesleyan University Press brought out a revised edition in 2000.

Between 2002 and 2006 I revised all my previous versions of Vallejo and translated his first book, Los heraldos negros, enabling me to present a translation of all of his poetry to the University of California Press, which published The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo, with a Foreword by Mario Vargas Llosa, in 2007.

My life with Vallejo has been a crazy-quilt trajectory. Its usefulness, as an example, for a young translator, might be this: sink your teeth into a project that you are willing to go to the ends of the earth to complete and make sure that it is a project whose completion will teach you something about poetry you cannot learn elsewhere.

While 20th century American poetry is rich and diverse, it is a single nation poetry and not representative of global, human experience. By translating, a poet learns things about his own language that he does not learn reading English language poetry and, more importantly, translation enables him to tap into lodes of non-American experience that can deepen and density his own base. Miklos Radnoti, Aimé Césaire, Vladimir Holan, Antonin Artaud, and Vallejo have offered me, via translation, aspects of the human and the inhuman that I do not believe exist in our poetry.

As a co-translator, I have been extremely fortunate to have had two great co-translators to work with: José with Vallejo, and Annette Smith with Césaire. Besides being alert and responsible, José and Annette were both rigorously honest, which means in this context, among other things, being able to express ignorance, which leaves a problem open, rather than sealing it with a guess.

I think that the key lesson Vallejo holds today may be that of a poet learning how to become imprisoned, as it were, in global life as a whole, and in each moment in particular. All of his poetry urges the poet to confront his own destiny and to stew in what is happening to him – and to believe that his bewildering situation is significant. To be bound to, or imprisoned in, the present, includes not only confronting life as it really is but also psyche as it really is not – weighing all affirmation against, in a North American’s case, our imperial obsessions and our own intrinsic dark.

Check it out at:

www.lesliegreentree.ca

 

Here I mean to add to the important subjective poetics dialogue reinvigorated in recent years by Fanny Howe’s “Doubt” and Alice Notley’s “The Poetics of Disobedience”.

Dubious: On Performance

I am vanishing as I speak. Soon I’ll be long gone. I’ve cut the “lip” off my first name, dropped the middle name, keep blowing the candle out as I call myself – Ph – am underway – just verbs …

To get language past its coaches & couches, to get it to roust its own circus & not be “put to bed”, involves extracting the egos from it, tinker by tinker. (“We were here but now this is here.”)

But performing (publishing too) is about praise.

Buy my name every time you see me. That’s the market politics of it. (But poetry is a gift economy.)

Ego off stage is ego centre stage. (“When I step out of the spotlight, I have to put my fork down,” is what Johnny Cash learns at the Mayo Clinic.)

Like many, I started to write for notice, for praise – to get strokes. But I grew up & the process of making took over.

To “make up” a poem is still to “get too big for your britches.” It’s risky, but a rhyme is a funny costume folks notice.

I still thrill to applause, but the poem – & its process – drowns in it, lacklustre.

The poem needs ear plugs. (Is it partially deaf?) It cups its own ear to hear its own song separate from the loud speakers & chatter.

A poem with its own moat of silence always glistens with distinguishing ego.

But the moat is decorum, too. Take that away, & the gimme that never gets, takes.

When I sit through open mikes, I fear for a young woman chanting to the accompaniment of a humming dildo. I cringe to hear young guys who need therapy for their misogyny, not praise for their work-shopped anger.

It’s not that I doubt such alternative faiths, or mind disobeisance, but I’m wary.

I travel with & listen to a flickering question mark as I dwindle.

There are sprites & hooks (& what Henry Miller calls “islands of repair”) between each syllable, line, stanza.

My practise has grown to be: stay dubious enough to hear those islands-of-repair cleanly, without the static “his(s)” of me needing to own them.

Hope has gradually become for me the unquelchable (quell nor quench) expectation of writing next an imperfect poem that will eventually prove all of my imperfections irrelevant.

I perform when I read. I care whether listeners have a good, provocative, magical time or not, so I try to ritualize & make sacred the time during which I share my work. For this, the text needs not to be sacred. It is a show, not a slide-show of the pages of a book.

Humour; storytelling; fetishism; the long, amateur, oral memory; call & response; repetition; reference to literary characters and traditions: all of these are part of what I try to offer along with & in among poems & parts of poems.

One of my models for a good show is Bruce “Utah” Phillips who will mix a musical concert with Wobbly history & personal history, blending these with songs (his own & by others) toward a learning & lightening of the assembled group – a chautauqua.

Utah will introduce an anecdote or an instance of political betrayal by saying, As you remember … This compliments the audience on knowing more than they probably do while posing shared history as common fact.

As you will remember … This also steps right over our modern version of Artist & Model – which is either Patient & Shrink or Watcher & TV – depending on your income.

Still, around each gated one-on-one, the pastures of the long memory …

If we perform well we might push back our hoods & give self over to shared sway.

The we may ride the I a moment. The personality invite company on stage. The voice evolve from still to film.

Instead of trying to please everyone, like that old story of the man & his son & their donkey.

These days, the I surfs the we. Many carry their poor donkey through a maze of cubicles.

Upside down, its hooves tied together over a pole, its head careening like a giant nose, the I is braying & knocking over the paper-shredder.

I want the atmosphere of a reading to be – not church with its formalisms – but a zone more primitive, more pantheistic. Aeslops.

Not Hymn Number 18, but the Delphi Waltz. Delphi Waltz out-takes.

That’s why I don’t mind interrupting a poem to chat an aside about a reference. Humility is my text’s only sacredness.

Sometimes when I’m talking to an audience, I feel as if I am playing myself, or a version of myself – an earlier or later persona.

Though I try to resist the pomp & fakery of theatre, I have been Homer Hollowbone, Dr Fish, Francis Nurse, Frank Butler, Rumpelstiltskin, Holly Phillips …

It is difficult to resist the personae that accrue to a name even as it’s whittled away.

Because of this difficulty, The Poetics of Failure & The Poetics of Disgust are both attractive to me. The former allows for imperfection, so honours both the imperfect poem & the imperfect poet; the latter allows for refreshing anger, gothic gross-outs (see Lara Glenum), & (in my case) an aesthetic of self-deprecation.

At long-last, re-enter the wounded quiver-filler (Philoctetes), the self-poisoning bard-fly (Dylan Thomas), the misanthropic sad sack (Philip Larkin), our own “drunken tai chi” teacher/poet (Fred Wah), & even the purposefully un-talented sysoperatics of Kenny Goldsmith …

Exit the long-distant Laureate Kings and Queens; enter the hand-to-mouth, doubt-riddled, disobedient, dubious, singing off-key “public servant” …

Enter The Flat Études (platitudes). The Amateur-Masters. Legendary unrecorded fiddle players …

To hand someone by mouth something of words that you have made carefully – or blurted – is not the same as publishing a book. Distance is an aesthetic value.

Proximity is internal. Near an early Riopelle – the air is glutinous!

To write with a pen or pencil is not the same as typing. Not the same gnomon.

To write with a pen is a different animal than writing with a pencil.

The manual, the electric & the computer are different experiences with different textures also.

The tinker’s goal is to keep a poem mammal, to keep it from becoming (or being raised by) reptiles or robots.

We are not “machines to chirp” as Deleuze & Guattari would have us be. We are organisms. We have minds, not mind-sets. We squelch. Our poems should squelch. Even our names should squelch. With grease-waft.

As Marjorie Perloff says, “If genius theory is passé, if there is no such thing as unique style or authorial presence, why are these names so sacred?”

I’ve been dreaming of an exchange of manuscripts with friends: I would publish my work under their names, their works would be published under mine. We would read each others’ poems.

If fact, what about the poet as cat-bird? Instead of building my own nest, I could lay my eggs in other birds’ nests; instead of publishing my own books, I could get other poets to include one poem of mine in each of their books …

It will be a good day when “genius” suggests “generated” by an “I” that is “us.”

Charles Bernstein says, “If individual identity is a false front, group identity is a false fort.”

To split a voice into pseudonyms is only to concertina ambition. To shout collectively from behind a phalanx of sharpened pencils is only to re-medievalize the solo.

But if the poem is partially deaf & shy of ego, it might best come out as un-owned muddle-song. Focus is Grace. Error is character. Rhythm is knowledge.

What we might be making, then, is The Music of Error.

Or call it The Music of Failure. Or call it The Music of Disgust.

Whether social, personal, or structural – to focus on raw inadequacy; by whatever name, to be its instruments – its vehicles.

Banjo is the instrument I choose to be, a cross between a frying pan & a kite. Canoe is the vehicle I choose to be, a mouth on water …

As is the alphabet – hammered by squelch & grease-waft – onto paper that can be folded to float or fly.

Relationships between the Periodic Table & the Alphabet are obvious once we fall asleep.

The body may be the Periodic Table translated into the Alphabet. Thus, topsoil gives tongue. (May these relationships go unexplored & so stay sacred.)

A focus on music & imperfection – helps avoid the snares of subject & personality – by concentrating on the sound of content rather than its meaning. (This is related to what Steve McCaffery calls – the poem’s input/output economy – vs its form.)

The Music of Error also concentrates on the (playful) savant aspect of flaws – rather than on the (business) commodity aspect of smarts.

Subject is invited to cease meaning & dance. Self is invited to cease playing statues & let fly the deprecations.

Maybe I’m just suspicious of anything too clean, too dirty, too owned, too funded by trust, too prayed to …

Decadence & sainthood eat from the same bowl that has never begged.

Even the sacredness of anonymity can be a mask. In “Song of Myself” Whitman approaches It-dom – but he starts, after all, from “old Walt.”

Even the nobility of the collective (or its voice) can be a trap. In The People, Yes – Carl Sandburg – by over-simplification, folk humour, & corn-hustings – reduces all of the bright colours in the working class voice to one brown smear.

In fact, why publish or do readings at all? Perhaps the blessing of focus is performance enough. Keep a journal obsessively & forget about the rest.

Tinkering may do the world-sustaining work that we flatter ourselves our performances & publications do.

I have a sneaking suspicion that if Emily Dickinson’s little hand-made books were still unfound in a trunk somewhere, or if Agamemnon’s gold mask were still buried below the plains of Turkey, they would still both be nurturing the sinews of quality & focus that sustain us all.

Works of extreme focus sustain us by existing alone. Who was reading Rabelais today, besides a quote here & there? Or even something as recent & vital as Translations of the Gospel Back into Tongues by C.D. Wright? (Pick your own examples.)

How much more small & ruthless we would be if such textual monstrosities & monasteries weren’t cosetted somewhere, performing by sustaining only focus.

I am haunted by the story of someone recognizing Laurence Sterne’s corpse as it was being dissected by students a week after his death, his poor body having been sold to the local medical college. His face was being peeled back, then let flop. Such stories make cries of “Author! Author!” seem cheesy.

This body – its tight scrolls that can’t be unfurled or cracked by study. This body – its intricate adios.

When the hands come together (clapping, praying) – when the breath gives out (thank you, good night, good-bye) – each word has a long way to go, again – clutching its roots – tumbling in the dark by itself – to the next spotlight – the next mouth …

 

Notes

Bernstein, Charles. “The Revenge of the Poet-Critic, or The Parts Are Greater than the Sum of the Whole,” My Way: Speeches and Poems. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago press, 1998).

Glenum, Lara. The Hounds of No. (Tuscaloosa: Action Books, 2005).

Howe, Fanny. “Doubt.” Gone. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). [and a live recording at www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/XCP.html].

Mclennan, Rob. Jon Paul Fiorentino’s Transcona, Winnipeg & the Poetics of Failure. Open Letter. Twelfth Series: No. 5 Spring 2005.

Middleton, Peter. Distant Reading: Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry. (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2005).

Ngai, Sianne. “Raw Matter: A Poetics of Disgust.” Telling It Slant: Avante-Garde Poetics of the 1990s. Mark Wallace and Steven Marks, eds. (London and Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2002).

Notley, Alice. “The Poetics of Disobedience.” www.epc.buffalo.edu/authors/notley/disob.html.

Ollendorf, Guillaume. “Nouveau millénaire, Défis libertaires – Gilles Deleuze et Felix Guattari: La machine à gazouiller!” http://1libetaire.free.fr/Guattari6.html

Perloff, Marjorie. “Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject: Ron Silliman’s Albany, Susan Howe’s Buffalo". www.wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/perloff.

 
Phil Hall, 2007

 

A Ripple

 At the fire tower on the Second Dome
above Dawson at bright midnight solstice
 (the Yukon widening around Tr’ondëk islands)

mosquitoed cursive – eating rhubarb pie
 at the top edge of the guide-bookish
over into the uneven eventless mouth mine

 Bill shy the fire ranger plays Scotland the Brave
half-bore as best he is able on old reeds
 his breath fog plumbing bagpipes – a ripple

of the Periodic Table – our ground-sheet flag
 as the drone & the lilt in the stop-cocks try
to skin this flung church of its glare …

 Mom never could tolerate the pipers swinging
their big hairy volcanoes on the 4th of July
 without crying – for lost reasons

for a wider pulse – until blood
 meant nothing – glint gape trickle hoof mud

 

Permafrost

 As I witness the soft road
bum light from smoke & smoke from light
 I wish I had a spirit-food to suck at me like that

nothing sucks at me – it sucks my boots right off
 my head while I’m sleeping – it cuts their tongues out
& boils them like a bishop forgiving snow its trespasses

 perfectly good mukluks of mine have been shoved down
sump-holes – deep – with a stick – by nothing – until the stick too
 vanishes – & it no twig – I’m just saying …

*

 Nothing hears no nest its one egg on rth

 

Carve

 Grant a walrus’s penis-bone eyes:
un-sheath claws

 a beak / wings
a price tag flutters south – mantle-piece

 grant sleep oosik’s eyes

she who rips ripples from sternums

Last year, April-May-June 2006, I was writer-in-residence at The Berton House in Dawson City, Yukon. Ten years ago, Pierre Berton donated his birthplace as a writer’s residency. I was honoured to be there as the first writer who works exclusively in poetry. These linked poems approach a travel essay about my internal time there.

Residency

 Their gables harvest moose
two scalloped bone-waves
 deep in a tin sky

I ate smoked heart
 to be polite–puked
brown troughs & spikes

 don’t laugh–I had a vision
my mouth leaks water-lilies
 I paint like Freud

 

Dawson

 3 months
I never put the film in the camera
 saw the Northern Lights
or despaired

 maybe once or twice a butter knife
honed to a needle-prow
 a greenhouse steaming with verdigris
one battery in the handle of a flashlight

 my soft spot trying to drink from a spring
my toes touching a face behind me
 to guess it

 

At Berton House
        for Dick North

 I wasn’t what you’d call happy
necessarily–but I was out of bed
 dressed & off looking for the cemeteries
on the mountain above Dawson

 I glanced back down
the whole City was there
 just a village really–an oil-can-roofed squat
gussied by Parks Canada
 at the delta of those two disgruntled wild rivers
The Yukon & The Klondike

 an ice bridge–a blue-grey Museum/Court House
the yellow pressed-tin Service bank
 the “How to Build a Fire” hills insouciant & unscathed
diamond-toothed from the fire towers

 majesty biding Time in clawed crevasses numb
looked back at my legendary pain & didn’t so much as
 caw–but I had my big moment anyway

I saw my pain as a quaint stash of pornography from the 50s
 nudist colony moms & pops with kids in buzz-cuts
tossing inflated globes or reading Albert Sweitzer together
 all manikin-orange by now–still perversely clean
but with blacked-in paper teeth I suck on
  for sustenance & inquisition

there it was–not Dawson City–my pain-city
 islanded in fog or sleep my wet-nurse that old slut
dog-dirty outmoded home from the trinket sea

 I was gone–writing in my head
Will I never witness where I actually am?

 then behind or below the City
for an instant despite myself–I saw
 (surviving in the north & the folks I’d met)
what tourists like me never find
 & never stop trying to find
without staying put

 a dredged joy

That’s how CBC describes their Poetry Face-Off, although I must admit we were somewhat more civilized than that in Calgary on Thursday night. Because I won the Calgary Face-Off in 2004 with the poem “a fraud confessing” (not published anywhere other than on the CBC CD!) I was invited back to judge five Calgary and area poets - live on the air. My fellow judges were performance poet sheri-d wilson and arts critic John Spittal. The Face-Off took place in the Auburn Saloon, famed throughout Alberta as Calgary’s fabulous theatre bar.

Blaine and I got there early enough to settle in before my first brief interview - a glass of wine for me, and a pint of Guinness for him (we both note a big difference in taste from the “real” Guinness in Ireland, but it still makes us feel happier just to be near it). In the preliminary interview, I was asked to offer words of advice to poets. I did, although I didn’t say:
- don’t use swear words in your poems unless you are comfortable saying them in front of your mother
- if you write love poems about wine, people will make entirely erroneous assumptions about the state of your liver (it’s just fine after the transplant, thank you)
Nor did I say: funny how a person who dislikes a poet for whatever reason will often see themselves in the poet’s work. And they’re never the good character. I wonder what Freud would have to say about that …

But I digress. Tonight, I just had to sit back, wine in hand, head cocked intelligently (I practice that), and listen to five poets. It was bloodless, but a hoot nonetheless. The year I won the Calgary Face-Off, the theme was “belonging” - very much in keeping with my poetic tastes. Naturally, I wrote on NOT belonging. The CBC theme this year was “irresistible” - I was relieved not to hear five poems about chocolate. Instead, there was a wide range of poems and a wide range of reading styles. We judges were offered the microphone after each reading; pithy witticisms and pertinent points abounded, and then we huddled for the chore of choosing one winner.

Having experienced this two years ago, I wondered if sympathy pangs for every contestant would make it difficult for me to come to a decision. Not so. Apparently I am of the “off with their heads” school of thought. While we all appreciated the work and performance of every one of the poets who competed, the most interesting part of the judging remains in taking the opinions of very different people, batting them about, sipping more wine, and then coming to a consensus. We reached one that we were all very happy with: Michael Green.

The poets shared the stage with one of the best musicians I’ve heard live in quite a while: one Zoe Theodorou. While we huddled and muttered, she entertained the audience again. Frankly, I think that’s part of the reason we took a while to decide - I didn’t want her to stop playing! She had amazing hair, too, which I think is of vital importance to any public figure or entertainer.

Tune in to www.cbc.ca/poetryfaceoff for details on readings across Canada, and information on how and when to vote for your favourite in the National Face-Off!

Check out Zoe’s website, too. Her music is as good as her hair: www.zoemusic.ca

While I’m making recommendations, you might as well try the Tempranillo at the Auburn, too. The entire night was delicious.

You Canadians who are sick and tired of all that cold weather are cordially invited to come on down and warm up by attending the National Book Festival, sponsored by the Library of Congress and scheduled for the National Mall in Washington on September 24.

Here’s a list of authors: http://www.loc.gov/bookfest/authors.html. Under “Poets,” you’ll see the names as such luminaries as Donald Hall, Alice Fulton, Mary Jo Salter, and even yours truly, otherwise known as the Dixie Nightingale.

Come down and let us sing for you!

Cheers,

David

The uses to which fiction writers put poetry has become an issue in recent days. In THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, David Orr writes about the way a character in Ian McEwan’s SATURDAY uses Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” to disarm a criminal; the trick, Orr says, is that poetry lets us enter a private space in which time slows down and possibilities expand,” a place where a man may look at the knife in his hand and decide not to use it.

Michael Cunningham’s new novel SPECIMEN DAYS uses poetry on an even larger scale; for a review, see:

http://www.sptimes.com/2005/07/10/Books/A_weird__dazzling_tri.shtml

Cheers,

David

After more than a week of continuous smog advisories in Toronto, at last a massive storm with copious lightning and blinding sideways rain cleared the air. This took place during the time my flight was scheduled to depart for Dublin, giving me an extra three hours in the airport to contemplate what might lie ahead. Since it was my first trip to Ireland, I was determined to keep my eyes open and learn what I could of this country of some, though not all, of my ancestors. These particular ancestors are members of the Kelly Clan, hinting at a stretched, but not improbable, relation with the famous Australian bandit Ned Kelly, of whom the novelist Peter Carey has written so convincingly.

The first thing that struck me after landing at Dublin was a tall brown building glimpsed from the window of the Air Coach as we made our way to the city centre, a building calling itself ROYAL LIVER ASSURANCE. If you have ever spent much time on that side of the Atlantic these words might make more sense to you than they did at first to me. “Assurance,” I presumed, meant “insurance,” but “liver” opened many somewhat puzzling possibilities, some more fanciful than the others. Was it possible that an internal organ of the Queen (or possibly of the Prince of Wales) was insured (against damage?) by a corporation in Dublin? Might this have to do with the quantities of Guinness and Irish whiskey shipped across the small stretch of water which separates Ireland from England and Scotland? Or could it be (more plausibly of course) that “liver,” rather than referring to that oft-abused organ which can stand metonymically for the whole organism, is really the short form of “one who lives"? That is, Royal Life Insurance. This, Ruth Smith later assured me, is in fact the correct explanation.

After checking into the hotel, I wandered out at 5 p.m. to buy some cough medicine. The Toronto smog had left me with sinusitis, and I needed to make sure I could get through the following day’s activities, which would include a fair bit of talking. I discussed my requirements with the pharmacist, who recommended a certain brand, impressing upon me that I must be sure to take “five meals” of it, and that it would be perfectly appropriate to ingest it with alcohol if I so desired. Five meals? We went back and forth over this a few times until at last I grasped what he was saying. I was to take five mils at a time, and it was ok to drink Guinness with it too.

I tasted my first half pint of true Guinness at lunchtime the next day, thanks to Ruth Smith. Then a second half pint after the poetry panel (lovely thoughts on poetry as a form of life from Theo Dorgan, Carolyn Forche, and Charles Simic), and a full pint after the evening reading. Both the cough syrup and the Guinness worked well. I can report that Guinness does indeed taste better in Ireland. It’s more subtle, with more velvet highlights and amber sparkles than elsewhere.

The next day the whole Griffin contingent was invited to lunch at the residence of Ambassador Mark Moher and his wife Jean. This was a beautiful affair in every way, held in a high-windowed house with fine Canadian art, a view of the sea, and exceptional gardens. There we saw the tallest eucalyptus tree in all of Ireland, a view Ned Kelly’s descendants would surely appreciate. I didn’t want to leave, but three of us had flights to catch that afternoon.

Ruth Smith, Robin Robertson and I were driven from the Ambassador’s residence to Dublin airport, a trip of something over an hour, by an astonishing cabbie who, among many other fascinating things, had served for three months as Fred Astaire’s driver. He told endless stories of the old Dublin and the new, which he understandably preferred. Robin Robertson, who was sitting in front with this masterly cabbie and kept him talking, turned around at one point to give me the look that all writers recognize: “Are you going to write the poem or am I?” It’s a poem only Robin Robertson could write.

There’s just one more bit to report. On my return to Toronto, the young official checking my papers at Pearson airport asked the purpose of my short trip. “Pleasure,” I replied, “and poetry…” I could tell this wasn’t making the proper impact. “A quick look at Dublin,” I added fruitlessly. “What exactly did you do there?” he probed. “Well,” I said truthfully, “a few hours ago I had lunch with the Canadian Ambassador” – and I was waved through just like that.

This will be my final blog from the UK, and be warned - it’s going to be a long one! So many wonderful adventures, and I’ve been far too lazy (I should say busy - sightseeing, flirting with Blaine, and sampling the food and beverages) to write for a few days.

The train ride to Galway was fantastic. I’ve never taken a train before, and I loved it - so soothing. The scenery was magnificent (I know, there I go with all the adjectives again), so lush and green. Galway sits right on the coast. My first glimpse of Galway Bay took my breath away. This is the Ireland I came to see - the jagged rocks jutting out from amidst the softest layers of green. We dumped our bags and went for a long walk along the sea wall. The wild swans made me think of Yeats. So many things make me think of Yeats.

The River Corrib runs through Galway, as do several canals. It’s a small, watery city with cobbled streets and a vibrant, noisy nightlife. It was easy to get out of the tourist areas and get a good feel for the city. The air smelled of sea and canal, wild fuchsia and fireweed.

The Engineering Department of the University of Ireland is built above the canal, and located at Nun’s Island. My darling engineer just didn’t know which way to go with that - he was speechless for almost twenty seconds before declaring it a serious drainage faux pas. He was sure he could re-build the City, just give him a couple of pints and a sharp 2H pencil.

The true highlight of our entire journey was our trip to the Aran Islands. Inishmoor, to be precise, the largest of the islands. We leapt off the ferry and immediately began walking, avoiding the tours and escaping the other passengers.

At low tide we wandered a small beach made up entirely of tiny shells of blue, yellow, iridescent pink, orange and green. We were part of (perhaps caused) an Aran traffic jam - a car approaching from one side, a mini-van from the other, a cyclist and the two of us on a road as wide as a parking stall, lined with waist-high stone walls. We were at a standstill for seconds.

Inishmoor is two miles wide and nine miles long, so it took little time to cross the island to the cliff side. We climbed a rocky path lined with stone fences until we were at the top of the world. We could see for miles (Blaine was pretty sure he could see his house) - on land, there are stones everywhere, piercing the thin soil and intersecting the landscape in grey, stark fencelines; a barren, haunting landscape with not another human in sight. The cliffs were a sheer drop hundreds of feet to the cold Atlantic hammering at the rocks below. I’ve never seen anything so wild and ruthless. We sat on the rocks and watched gulls sweeping through the spray thrown up from the crashing waves.

This is the scenery of ‘Riders to the Sea’, a play by Synge. The reason, actually, that I needed to visit the Aran Islands. This day is the culmination for me - what the trip was all about. Everywhere I’ve gone in Ireland has been haunted by its writers, but the Aran Islands are magical. We stood on the ferry deck on the way back, reluctant to lose the Atlantic spray, the soft rain on our faces.

We arrived in London to a heatwave. Dubliners kept telling us it was unusually hot in Ireland, and it’s even nicer here. We took the underground to Covent Garden. There was a line-up for the lift, and a sign saying it was 193 stairs to get to the top. Unfortunately, I have trained Blaine too well in my virtuous “No, let’s take the stairs” attitude.

By halfway up I was thinking less than loving and supportive thoughts about my sweetheart, the love of my life. By the top, I was too busy sweating and trying to breathe to do more than wave a weak fist in his direction and bark out, “You. A pint. For me. NOW".

We saw Trafalgar Square and all the great public buildings that surround it, including Canada House. People climbed all over three of the four lions in the square, the fourth being occupied by a lipsticked young Lolita sunbathing between its paws, peeping through her lowered lashes to see the effect she was having.

After walking for miles, we had a light supper - a salad of crayfish, smoked salmon, cucumbers and cherry tomatoes on rocket, with a raspberry vinaigrette, followed by a thin-crust pizza topped with tuna, calamata olives, anchovies, smoked salmon and capers with marscapone. We left a loonie along with the tip and stumbled home happy.

Yesterday, we spent hours in the British Museum, with most of my time focused on Greek sculpture. There is far too much to see in one trip. The British Museum houses pieces of sculpture I have long wanted to see - a kouros and a kore from the Archaic period. It was amazing to see them in the flesh (in the stone, I suppose). The other sculpture was one of the Caryatids (the second Caryatid from the left, to be precise, originally in a row of four on the Erechtheum), and the Nereids.

At the National Gallery, we saw enough amazing artwork to keep me happy for the rest of my life. My favourite Turner painting, many works by Cezanne, whose work I love, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers … I could go on forever (but I’m paying for this terminal by the hour and it’s cutting into my pub money). We walked along the Thames and took the underground all over the city. It’s 31 degrees, so we had to stop regularly for refreshment.

And now we are at our last day in London. We fly home tomorrow. Blaine is taking me somewhere today, but he won’t tell me where. Tonight we see ‘Hedda Gabbler’, have a final glass of wine or two, and head back to our tall, warm hotel for a final night of falling asleep to the street noise of London. Besides the art and history, there are many other cultural things we’ll miss: roasted lamb and mint crisps, toast so thin it’s like you’re buttering individual strands of its DNA, strong brown tea of the type usually used for faking the patina on counterfeit manuscripts, money named for its weight rather than its value, and the subtle pleasure of being a stranger in a strange land.

Our gratitude to Scott and Krystyne Griffin for making this possible, and to Ruth (The Good) for every single thing she does. Thanks to those of you who have written in, making us both laugh. We’re looking forward to tossing around Ireland stories for years to come. Blaine is looking forward to seeing his girls again, and we’re excited to give them the little gifts we’ve found. I’m looking forward to a joyous reunion with my own fuzzy white child, Mick.

Now that the festival, in all its variety, has officially concluded, we’ve got some time to sample the variety of the famed Dublin theatre scene. Our first play was LADY WINDERMERE’S FAN, a straight-up presentation of Wilde’s classic with zingers a-flyin’ and costumes yummy enough to eat. Then we saw something at the total opposite of the dramatological (that’s an Irish word, one I just made up) spectrum. Our second play was called PERCHANCE TO DREAM, a conflation of five Shakespeare plays staged by a multi-lingual traveling troupe in a tent down by the river Liffey. Which was better? Neither one; we need both kinds of plays, and each of these was a pinnacle of its type. Tonight we’ll take a cab up to the famed Abbey Theatre founded by Yeats, where we’ll see a third kind of play, one called . . . well, why not go to the Abbey web site and find out, because the title slips my mind, though not the one-line plot summary – it’s a stagey treatment of a Celtic myth involving Deirdre and the Sons of Usna. Sounds like trouble at that point where gods and mortals mingle, does it not?

While we’re seeing different kinds of plays, we’re doing the same with different kinds of pals. We’ll have lunch today with Mary Balthrop, just arrived from Florida State to direct our university’s summer program here. Then tomorrow, we’ll get a pub lunch with the Irish poet Dennis O’Driscoll, who introduced himself at the Dublin Writers Festival. So which is better, an old friend or a new? Well, it’s like poetry and plays, folks; you really do need a lot of everything in your life, and believe me, Dublin offers more everything than you can shake a stick at.

And so it is with, not sorrow, but a true Italian arrivederci sense that we’re about to say “See you again, Dublin!” We’ll be in New York in a couple of days, grateful to our Irish hosts, to Ruth Smith, to Scott and Krystyne Griffin, and to the countless strangers who showed us kindness over here. Thanks for checking in on this blog from time to time. Have fun and thanks for loving poetry. ~ David

We leave Dublin tomorrow, on a train to Galway. After a week of Guinness, Blaine is convinced that not only does it contain nine essential vitamins and minerals, but likely fibre as well. He calls it “the original booster juice.”

Something I haven’t made clear about the pubs here are the levels and tiers to be found within them. Yesterday we stopped at Messrs MacGuire for the third time this week, and discovered three more rooms that we hadn’t seen on previous visits. The one we chose to have our pint in was up four steps from the previous level, through a narrow doorway. There was room for five chairs, and we were in our own little world, debating the difference between a nook and a cranny. Blaine is adamant that a cranny is an old nook. Such a metaphor for life - we all wander around thinking we’re young n0oks, and wake one morning to find we’ve turned into a cranny. (You can see the sort of intellectual debate we like to engage in, Blaine and I.)

The Dubliners can’t believe the weather here. It’s been far hotter than the forecast, and very humid. Last night we went in search of Fishamble Street. We happened on it a few days ago, and I wanted to go back. I think it’s my favourite street in Dublin. It’s only about three blocks long, cobbled, winding enticingly up to Christchurch Cathedral. When we found it and started up the hill, the bells were ringing. I don’t know how long they rang for, but we could hear them for blocks and blocks.

By the time we got back to the hotel, we were limp with the humidity. We sat in the lobby and visited with Gerald Stern and his partner Anne Marie Macari, who’s also a poet. When we realized the lobby was far warmer than out-of-doors, we followed the lead of the renegades roaming the streets and took our drinks outside (illegal but ignored by the Garda – a benevolent presence, standing off to one side, like your father at a school dance, ready to wag a finger at the lads). We sat on the windowsill of the hotel for two hours, watching the world go by: young women teetering along the cobblestones on impossibly high heels, young men calling and laughing across the streets. I love summer, the way we all so gratefully bare our arms and shoulders to the warmth.

The Griffin Prize reading on Thursday night must have worked – the aduience seemed quite lit up afterward, and that was even before the free drinks. Dominating the scene, of course, was the mighty Gerald Stern, who is also the Dr. Johnson of the Dublin Writers Festival, making me his Boswell. “Are you the Pope of Poetry, Gerald?” I asked. “That’s right,” he said, “the Jewish Pope!” Then: “Hey, Gerald, I don’t get the headlines here – they always say something like ‘MacDougal Defies MacDermott,’” to which Gerald says, “I’m for Mac Dermott!” And: “Gerald, is the Ireland we’re in the bad Ireland, or is that the other one?” Answer: “Aw, I like ‘em both – but there’s people in each of ‘em I don’t get along with!”

The Temple Bar area, where we are staying, is the Bourbon Street of Dublin, though without strippers. The latter are not needed, though, to keep the hormones flying. The level there is maintained by what one cabbie called numerous “stag” and “hen” parties, all roaming the streets in search of interspecies romance, which nobody seems to find. The noise level is unimaginable: as schedule organizer and get-it-done gal Ruth Smith tells me, it’s the ladies who are keeping us awake at night, “because girls are always cackling and giggling and screeching!” No wonder the friendly hostess in the breakfast room always greets me with a cheery “How’s your head, sir?” Fine, ma’am, and if not, it’s nothing a full Irish breakfast of egg, bacon, sausage, tomato, potato, toast, and both black and white puddings won’t fix.

Next installment? Dublin’s theatre scene, because there’s more to culture here than stags and hens and black and white puddings.

I forgot my reading copies at home, so had to read from fresh books for the first time in my admittedly short poet career (because I’m in Ireland that didn’t seem like bad luck). So the first order of business Thursday was to buy post-it notes. Blaine and I walked happily for miles in search of them, although I’m sure they were available next door to our hotel. Strangely enough, they’re yellow and rectangular, just like at home.

The readings last night were great fun. I went first, so was able to sit back and properly enjoy the others with my own nerves out of the way. My Griffin Fairy Godparents hosted an open bar reception after the reading, to which they invited the entire audience. I’m telling you, these people know how to throw a party. But first, the reading itself was terrific - the sort of reading that makes non-believers say “Oh my God - THAT’s a poetry reading?” (In the good way, of course.)

David Kirby is like a great wine - one more year and he was even more delicious. Gerald Stern, Roo Borson, Charles Simic, and the fabulously morose and interesting Robin Robertson all read. I laughed, I muttered, I felt great jealousy at the things I heard that I wished I’d written, and then laughed more and drank wine with a beautiful young poet named Dympna, and a gaggle of university students from Colorado. It was a great audience - intelligent and friendly, and I don’t think that was just because of the lure of free drinks.

Roo and I read in the first half of the evening, so were seated at a table on stage with David Young (Griffin trustee and MC for the evening) and Scott Griffin, as well as our co-reader, Gerald Stern. When we came back from the intermission, the first half readers were seated in the front row, with David, Scott, David Kirby, Charles Simic and Robin Robertson at the table. With all of those men, in jackets and ties, facing me in a row at a table I felt like I was about to be turned down for a mortgage.

After the reception, we wandered the streets and had more drinks, but that’s as far as I’m going with this conversation - you’ll get no secrets out of me, no matter how many messages you post. We had little sleep, but got up this morning with plenty of time to scrub ourselves free of the previous night’s depravities (if you’re having trouble reading this know it was typed in six-pint font) and prepare for lunch at the home of the Canadian Ambassador to Ireland.

Miles of windy narrow roads finally led us to the Ambassador’s residence, across the street from Bono’s home. We saw his gardener (Bono’s, that is. You think I’d get excited over an ambassador’s gardener?). Yes, it’s entirely true - we saw Bono’s weed-whacker. It was quite a thrill, although you shouldn’t expect a poem about it any time soon.

Lunch was lovely. We’re thinking of putting in an offer on the place, as long as it comes with the salmon mousse and the people who top up our wineglasses every third sip (Blaine wanted to claim refugee status, until he was told the paper work would take six months and he’d have to stay at a Holiday Inn at the airport). Ambassador Moher and his wife were charming, and so we ended the formal portion of our trip. Blaine tried to leave the Ambassador a loonie on the way out, but he’d have none of it.

Ruth (The Good) bid us adieu at lunch, much to our sorrow. But we shall drink to her tonight, and meet her on the Ha’Penny Bridge exactly one year from Tuesday past.

Dublin is a great city for jaywalkers – everyone just charges fearlessly into traffic; I’ve been that way since I was two years old, so I love it here. The walk signal is for lickspittle conformists, as I see it, so why not get on with life, which is too short anyway? Most of these people are redheads from the Viking influence (they didn’t call him Eric the Brunette, you know) or “Black Irish” thanks to castaways from the Spanish Armada. Where are the original Celts? Making up more Gaelic somewhere, I suspect. I’m having trouble getting people to understand their own language. Why, just a minute ago I gave out a cheery “Dir dhuit!” ("God be with you!") to two guys and waited for their “Dia is Maire dhuit!” ("God and Mary be with you!") I thought they were bad scholars or else bad Catholics when they just stared at me, but then one said “Ich verstehe nicht": turns out they were just good Germans. Well, there’s a lot of traffic to be dashed into while the sun’s out; stay tuned for an update on the inimitable Gerald Stern (tomorrow).

What a beautiful day - hot and humid. My hair went all curly.

Blaine and I visited the Guinness Storehouse today for souvenirs. We passed a quartet of amazing young musicians on the way; two violins, a bass fiddle and a keyboard-type instrument kind of like a dulcimer. We threw a loonie into their basket along with a handful of euros. We wandered around the breathtaking Christchurch Cathedral on the way, as well. I still can’t get over the age of this country, and the buildings here. Life is fabulous; we are jaywalking like true Dubliners.

On our way back from the Guinness Storehouse we stopped for a pint at a pub called The Pale. One thing Blaine finds fascinating here are the little packets in all the pubs, alongside the ketchup, called “brown sauce.” That kind of truth in advertising just wouldn’t go over as well back home. He also loves to get up to buy us “a packet of crisps.” Imagine his disappointment when the last place gave us Pringles.

We met up with Ruth (The Good) for a couple of pints and a very happy reunion. The Queen of the Griffin is as lovely as ever, and so are her shoes. The three of us met David and Barbara for supper and a wander through the streets afterward. It was so great to see them again. David was falling over from jetlag by the end of dinner, but Blaine and I took Barbara out to The Porterhouse, Blaine’s proudest discovery, for a nightcap.

Tonight: the readings! I’m nervous, but Graham, our favourite bartender, did assure me that the Irish would have no trouble understanding my accent. I’m trying not to feel too intimidated by the company I’ll be keeping at this event.

This afternoon we attend a panel discussion hosted by Eleanor Wachtel, featuring Carolyn Forche as part of the panel. We’re looking forward to it, and to seeing her and the other trustees again. And, of course, my Fairy Godparents.

Well, Blaine and I have been wandering around like tourists for three days now (odd, we are tourists), getting to know Dublin, and almost forgetting at times the all-important reason that we’re here. Tomorrow, sometime, all sorts of great writers will begin to descend upon the city.

The most fun is that we’ll know a few of the descending writers. The gracious Carolyn Forche (it’s a European keyboard - I can’t figure out how to do accents), David Young, the man behind the camera at so many of the Griffin events last year (and thanks for not putting the awful ones on the net, with the purple teeth, you kind man, you), Scott and Krystyne Griffin (my Fairy Godparents), Robin Robertson, Jane Young (if she’s half as charming in person as she is by email …), of course, David and Barbara, and Ruth (The Good).

We were unabashed tourists today. We saw the Book of Kells at Trinity College. Of such a mind-boggling historic moment, there is nothing to say that hasn’t been said better by those with editors present and less ale in their systems. So, instead, may I bring to your attention the trivial – yet interesting – fact that peacocks, in the Book of Kells, symbolized the incorruptibility of Christ because of the ancient belief that their flesh did not putrefy.

From there, we went to the Long Room in Trinity College. At the risk of displaying my heathen tendencies (for those of you who haven’t read my writing), might I say, in all seriousness, that it was one of the most religious experiences of my life. A long room, two stories, with nothing but books in every shade of tan, beige, ochre, rust, sepia, caramel and dusty orange; many were tied with cream ribbon or twine. Twenty-two bays of ancient books framed within dark wooden arches, ladders in each bay leading to the second floor. The air smelled of dust and old books. People tiptoed, and whispered. A metal spiral staircase twined up to the second floor, to the left of the entryway. Marble busts lined the stacks on both sides.

Being a library person, I tried to figure out the cataloguing system for a while, but finally gave up. Apparently great literature pre-dates the Dewey Decimal System. We left loonies, with our Euros, in the collection fund.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but after a religious experience I need a beer. We went to The Porterhouse, a brew pub recommended by our bartender friend Graham from the other night. The Porterhouse not only features its own brewed beers, it also boasts a range of beers from around the world. (Oops, the marketer in me is showing again. Pardon.) It’s Canadian choice: Moosehead. The Porterhouse notes, entirely correctly, that while Canadian beer ads tend to show lots of wild animals and creeks and tank-topped beauties, most of our beers are actually now taken over by large American Beer Emporiums. Blaine is starting a petition to have Alexander Keith’s be the representational Canadian beer in Ireland.

From The Porterhouse (where, by the way, Blaine had Wrasslers 4X Stout, with Irish stew; I had Temple Brau with oysters and rye bread), we went to The National Library of Ireland. I’m not even going to try to defend this. If you’ve read this far, you know I’m a geek. Besides, libraries rule! And The National Library of Ireland is home to some of the most important texts in the world.

We saw a Hans Christian Andersen exhibit, and the James Joyce. We took a quick snoop into the sacred Reading Room, then we moved on to the National Gallery of Ireland. It’s a maze - all kinds of little rooms filled with treasures, leading to more little rooms with treasures. We wandered back on ourselves countless times only to find other nooks leading off of rooms we’d been in, that led to yet more treasures. Some of the antiquities are just tourists trying to find their way out.

Moments of illumination:

Caravaggio - The Taking of Christ
Vermeer - Woman Writing a Letter, with her Maid
Some other Christ painting, I can’t remember the title; artist: “A Northern Artist”
Portraits by John Butler Yeats, especially the women
A couple of strange, disturbing paintings by Jack B. Yeats, especially one called something along the lines of “This compelling conversation took place under the rose” (I know I have that wrong, so don’t bother writing in about it. Just google it and come have a look yourself the next time you’re in Ireland).

On our way to a pre-dinner pint at Messrs MacGuire, my life as a writer was put in perspective when we passed a local poet squatting on the sidewalk of Westmoreland Street, surrounded by his self-published books of poetry. He must be good - the hand-written sign taped to the sidewalk said his poetry was “the loveliest in Ireland". The other sign said “Free grand piano with every book” - a sales gimmick I’m noting for my own publisher.

Note to self: title for next book –
A Free Grand Piano With Every Book

(Blaine’s worried about the postage for the overseas orders.)

A slow start today, weighted down as we were by the Guinness and the red wine from yesterday evening. And did I mention the champagne? The chartreuse? The Irish whiskey?

It all began innocuously enough when we decided to end our street rambling with a pint at the hotel. Graham, our bartender, entertained and charmed us famously, and talked us into an Irish whiskey for a nightcap. We were then joined by two Irish musicians, Noeleen and Brian, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Oh, but we had fun. Noeleen spent several hours trying to extract a promise from us that we’d get married. “Marry him,” she told me. “He’s gorgeous. Just gorgeous.”

We slept late and woke feeling much better than we deserved. I do like champagne.

We walked for miles again today. Blaine is getting a good feel for the city, and since I’m directionally challenged, I just hold his hand and let him lead me around. It’s handy having my own personal engineer.

We went to the Dublin Writers’ Museum today, next door to the breathtaking Abbey Church. The museum is housed in an incredible building that was built in 1780. The celings upstairs were ornately painted, with archways, pillars and cherub friezes ringing the room. The old library almost made us weep with gratitude - creaking plank floors, old rare books behind glassed old rare bookshelves.

Word of the day: “stuccodore” - as in: “The ceilings upstairs were done by one of Dublin’s foremost stuccodores, Michael Stapleton.” What a great word.

(Forgive my over-use of adjectives. Most of my editors aren’t with me, and the one who is tells me he’s on vacation. But Dublin just calls for the occasional adjective.)

The Dublin Writers’ Museum was like visiting old friends. I’ve always loved Irish literature, and studied it in university. Seeing handwritten letters and first editions by such greats as Yeats and Synge was thrilling. To be reminded, in their birthplace, of the power and contribution to world literature of the Irish writers, is a humbling experience.

On the way back, we stopped at the Remembrance Gardens - a garden built to honour all who have died in the fight for Irish freedom. The bottom of the pool is glazed in brilliant ceramic tiles symbolizing broken weapons. Above them, a duck and her fat little ducklings paddled peacefully.

We stopped at the Bachelor’s Inn for a pint. The pub is long and narrow, and strangely bereft of women. It’s clearly the locals’ pub, full of men on their way home after work.

We took in a production of “Lady Windermere’s Fan” at the Gate Theatre last night. Another beautiful example of the architecture here, and a terrific play - witty and sharp. We laughed our heads off. Blaine thought it was quite similar to cocktail parties at his house, with more cigarette holders. I smiled and nodded. He looks great in his suit. Noeleen’s right - he is gorgeous, but I’m still not marrying the fecker.

One more day of sock-folding and we’re off to Dublin. The more I listen to my Gaelic tapes, the greater my respect for those hardy souls who’ve mastered this difficult language. My plan is to use the word “Feicim” (pron. FEH-kim) a lot; it means “I see” and can be used indefinitely to prolong a conservation. For example:

WAITER: Good evening, sir. Will you be dining with us this evening?
ME: I see.
WAITER: My name’s Cathal, and I’ll be your waiter. Welcome to the Mermaid!
ME: I see.
WAITER: The fish of the day is striped bass. How would you like that prepared?
ME: I see!

My friend Mary Balthrop, who directs my university’s summer program in Ireland, sent me this nifty link to a virtual tour of the Joyce and Ulysses exhibition at the National Library of Ireland website:

http://www.nli.ie/joyce/Virtual%20exhib/JoyceVirtualExhib1.htm.

More soon from Ireland,

David

Now when I talk about the upstairs of the Hairy Lemon Pub, you’re going to think we’re doing nothing but drinking here in Ireland (Blaine says he has so much iron in his system from the Guinness that he can no longer go through airport security), but we’ve also walked for miles and worn at least some of it off. Anyway, the upstairs at the Hairy Lemon is fantastic - narrow creaking stairs leading up to all kinds of small nooks - closed off on a Sunday - with brick archways and dark wood everywhere. This pub is older than my entire province.

The weather has been gorgeous. We wandered through St. Stephen’s Green today and laughed at the ducks as they dove for insects. As Blaine said, “Duck butts are universal.”

We’ve crossed every bridge that spans the River Liffey several times already: the Talbot Memorial, the Millenium Bridge, the Graffan, the O’Connell and the Ha’Penny. My engineer was in heaven. My favourite is the Ha’Penny - it’s pedestrian only, with all kinds of white arches and curlicues - a slim little wedding cake of a bridge. Blaine has a special fondness for the stone dignity of the O’Connell.

The buildings continue to amaze us . We walked around the Custom House, through Trinity College grounds for ages and the Quay. In Alberta, we just don’t build great public buildings, adorned with life-sized Greek gods and mythical beasts.

In Dublin, there are statues everywhere. My favourite statue of the day: Molly Malone, wheeling her barrow through streets broad and narrow. Our voluptuous Molly has twice the cleavage they’d let her show at home (although that may just be a Euro conversion); she’s quite lovely.

We’ve walked so far today, and seen so many statues, that I think we’re beginning to suffer from statue burnout. Blaine referred to the last one as “another dead guy with bird crap on his head” (hence the retirement to the newly famous Hairy Lemon Pub).

Tomorrow we’ll do some serious tourist stuff, but last night and today were about wandering, shaking off the jet-lag and soaking up the ambiance. And maybe tomorrow, we’ll find out what that word “fecking” means. It’s such a musical language.