Even though they both end in ‘S’ Clones is not Vegas. I know. I’ve been in both. It was in Clones, however, that your uncle Tommy found himself last Friday in the company of two lovely broadcasting ladies, slapping down a few stouts in a hotel bar and gazing at Bernard McLaverty getting outside a few red wines. Then Pat McCabe came in wearing what was probably the jacket Arthur Kane wears on the cover of the new York Doll’s ‘Too Much Too Soon’.
Immature poets borrow, mature poets steal. I boldly abstract this device from Clive James: “Mathews, you sand,” cried McCabe. “Soap! Sand! Soaping sand!” and so the long night wore on.
The next morning bedecked with high tech hand-lettered press badgesall hands were in attendance seated on hayricks in the barn to witness the ace scribe Sean O’Reilly read an eerie short story about a dog fed on consecrated hosts eating his owner. Then he read from his novel in progress. The we all milled about in the rain drinking coffee in the spills of rain in front of the stately home giving out shite about the bar not being open yet.
But soon it was and in scarcely the blink of an eye I was sitting on another bale of hay with Seamus Heaney wearing a hat that Tom Riordan would’ve envied watching Paul Muldoon being the smartest poet in Ireland and belting out a thundering version of what is for what is for me his masterpiece (as of this writing) ‘The Old Country’ a dazzling 13 part circular sequence that everyone should go and read at once. Some time later in a much bigger red striped tent Mr Heaney got to do his own stuff to a wowed crowd. When you are No.1 you just are, and he is. And god bless him he didn’t sign books. He has already signed a squillion books (including all mine) and he’s sick of it. In fact what he wants to do is write poems rather than open shopping malls or speak at cake sales and when I suggest later that he should devote the next year exclusively to the close study of Irish whiskey he says it’s not such a bad idea at that. Well about the light refreshing rain is dampening one and all no little, though the indomitable punters do not allow this to dampen their spirits and wander about the muddy fields swilling Murphys stout from plastic glasses and smoking many cigarettes and chewing dangerous looking hot dogs and burgers and a saucy fellow even offers your reporter a reefer but of course it goes against my Calvinist principles to be sullying the temple of my body with Tetra Hydro cannibanol when there is a guy with a hip flask of brandy standing by.
By and by it comes on dark and many citizens myself included troup back to the old hay barn to hear Paul Brady spank the plank. This he does to some effect causing the roof to raise particularly distinguishing himself with Arthur MacBride where he seemed to be playing about nine guitars at once. His new song ‘Mother And Son’ would melt a heart of stone.
But that didn’t stop Dylan Moran who had been refreshing himself fairly liberally earlier having a good try. The old maestro was not standing up on this occasion but reading from and occasionally dropping his short stories and he failed to go over a storm, though an actual storm which was going on outside the festival was quite successful.
Day two featured a lot of people taking cures in the form of plastic glasses of stout or (in my case) bottles of Cote De Rhone of which a shrewd hot dog manufacturer had got in a large supply. Encountering the poet Dawe I recited Chesterton’s excellent lines about Noah as the warm August rain soaked into our honest Irish forms.
“The soup he took was elephant soup
And the fish he took was whale
When he set out to sail.
And Noah he often said to his wife
When they sat down to dine.
‘I don’t care where the water gets
If it doesn’t get into the wine.’”
I didn’t make it to Ciaran Carson but M. Longley had some first rate things to say about poets one of which was that the poet was the priest of the muses. “Well my dear old priest of the muses,” I remarked to him as he signed a book for me in the spills of rain “how are things with you?” Reader things are fine with him. Other citizens who mentioned that things were fine with them were artists Charlie Cullen and Una Seely, novelists D. Healy, M.Mc Cormac and E. MacNamee, actor and boy wonder Little John Nee with whom I sang some George Formby songs and ace gal reporter and angel fan Victoria Mary Clarke with whom I didn’t.
I was just cutting up the old touches with Hot Press photographer H. Mulkerns in her lovely leather coat when an Australian man handed me Rupert Brooke’s collected poems and asked me to read the lovely Yeatsian lyric ‘Doubts’ this was art because he is making a movie of hundreds of people reading this neglected work. When I asked why he as selected me he said that a guy wearing a Ramones Tee Shirt was bound to be familiar with the oeuvre of Rupert Brooke.
A scant hour later I was clutching the tiny hand of Edna O’Brien and for some reason remarking that there were no sins inside the gates of eden. Readers age has not withered her nor custom stalled her infinite variety. Many eyes and cameras popped a she was borne away to the great house in some sort of mudmobile and popped off to the bar.
And that oh my little brothers and sisters is, in that convenient cliché a nutshell, how the old Flatlake Festival passed.