{"id":8555,"date":"2017-05-01T00:00:09","date_gmt":"2017-05-01T04:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/european\/?p=8555"},"modified":"2017-08-18T15:14:21","modified_gmt":"2017-08-18T19:14:21","slug":"event-highlights-irish-voices-a-reading-conversation-with-irish-poet-harry-clifton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/european\/2017\/05\/01\/event-highlights-irish-voices-a-reading-conversation-with-irish-poet-harry-clifton\/","title":{"rendered":"Event Highlights: Irish Voices &#8211; A Reading &#038; Conversation with Irish Poet Harry Clifton"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On Tuesday, April 18th, Irish poet Harry Clifton was the guest speaker at the Center for the Study of Europe, reading from his collection of poems, Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks 1994-2004. Clifton started the conversation by briefly describing different types of Irish poets and the complex emotions arising from the placement of Ireland within the broader interpretation of what it means to \u2018be European\u2019. Joking he said, \u201cas an Irish poet you are caught \u2013 as they say in the economic debate \u2013 between Boston or Berlin, and you are asked to choose \u2018are you on the Berlin side or are you on the Boston side?\u201d<\/p>\n<p><a data-flickr-embed=\"true\"  href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/11054951@N04\/albums\/72157679758812544\" title=\"04.18.17\"><img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/c1.staticflickr.com\/5\/4192\/34118963471_5802205588_z.jpg\" width=\"710\" height=\"471\" alt=\"04.18.17\"><\/a><script async src=\"\/\/embedr.flickr.com\/assets\/client-code.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>Clifton then gave the background of his poem \u201cEuclid Avenue,\u201d which was written 30 years ago while Clifton was a visiting fellow at the Iowa International Writers Conference. While the poem is a reflection upon his university days, Clifton explained his childhood experience, \u201cgrowing up in Ireland in the 1950s and \u201860s, you were part of a post-independence Ireland where the poetry was part of what you might call the \u2018pedagogy\u2019 \u2013 it was coming from above down and it was lots of early Yates, lots of folk identity \u2013 very beautiful poetry but if, as in my case, you grew up in a city and you had other roots, cosmopolitan roots, you found that you had to go looking for a voice somewhere else.\u201d He then delved into describing his exposure to two things during university which profoundly influenced his writing: European philosophy and modern American poetry. After discovering the fantastic spectrum of 20th century American poetry, Clifton explained his fascination with Hart Crane\u2019s work, including the intriguing fragment of a poem. Introducing his poem, \u201cEuclid Avenue,\u201d Clifton commented that the \u201cwords \u2018Euclid Avenue\u2019 were like a poem in themselves,\u201d and continued by admitting, while a common name in suburban America, the \u2018Euclid Avenue\u2019 had an \u201cenergy\u2026like a coiled spring\u201d and that there was something \u201cquite American, and different\u201d about the words. Clifton added \u201cI often feel \u2013when I\u2019m in America \u2013 that I\u2019m in a society that\u2019s in perpetual movement, and that I\u2019m always in the presence of an undertone of automotive power. I can hear a sort of ground base of American life in the background all the time and it\u2019s an energy that\u2019s going outwards, whereas Irish energy is often going inwards \u2013 it\u2019s an introverted sort of super-historical energy.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The poet then talked about transitions, and his experience moving from Ireland to the continent at the end of the 1980s, a time when Europe had \u201ccome to be considered a museum \u2013 a very beautiful place, but somehow frozen.\u201d Clifton continued, \u201cthe ice broke in 1989 and the old energies that had been buried emerged from the permafrost of all the Cold War years,\u201d something he identified as a crucial juncture in the re-establishment of Europe. He complimented Europe in its \u201ccapacity for dying and resurrecting itself,\u201d and commented on the immortal energies that thrive in Europe. He then read several poems related to his experience in the Apennine Mountains in Italy.<\/p>\n<p>Clifton paused in his readings to discuss his fascination with the mixture of light and darkness in the energy of Europe, stating \u201cI often think of Europe as the conscious of the world, because it has lived through things that other parts of the world might yet live through but haven\u2019t lived through,\u201d emphasizing how his interpretation of \u2018conscious\u2019 encompassed both its positive and negative connotations, viewing the idea as an \u201cincubator of things that often come to terrible fruition in other places, as well as in Europe itself.\u201d He then moved on to described the timelessness of Europe in his reading of \u201cThe Landbridge\u201d about the pilgrimage route from Paris to Rome, followed by a discussion of the climate and natural environment in Europe before reading \u201cCitrus\u201d and \u201cDaffodils\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Clifton then explained the relationship between poets and their audience as an \u201cactive friendship,\u201d and then opened the floor to a conversation with the audience. After several minutes of Q&amp;A, Clifton transition back into reading from his collection of poems, focusing on those related to Ireland, including a description of a traditional dark humored Irish joke. Clifton read from his poem \u201cBurial With Your People,\u201d which describes a fluid landscape, \u201chalf night, half day; half water, half sky \u2013 you would not know exactly what side of existence you\u2019re on\u201d and tied the piece back to the \u201cgreat statement of the melancholic nature of the Irish mind in its approach to things that are life giving, life affirming.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>After a second period of conversation with the audience, Clifton ended by highlighting his personal favorite Irish poetry: the elementary writing of hermits who wrote about the delicacies of nature and raw untouched island. He finished by reading \u201cAfter Ireland,\u201d his own interpretation of Ireland before the modern era, a piece which, Clifton explained, was his attempt to capture the tone of the early Irish poets he was inspired to emulate.<\/p>\n<p>You can watch the entire conversation here:<\/p>\n<div class=\"responsiveVideo responsive-youtube\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/drZXEd8OO7A?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\n<p>This year&#8217;s European Voices events are organized in collaboration with the literary journal AGNI and the Goethe-Institut Boston and are taking place as part of EU Futures, a series of conversations exploring the emerging future in Europe. The EU Futures project is supported by a Getting to Know Europe Grant from the European Commission Delegation in Washington, DC to the Center for the Study of Europe at Boston University.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On Tuesday, April 18th, Irish poet Harry Clifton was the guest speaker at the Center for the Study of Europe, reading from his collection of poems, Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks 1994-2004. Clifton started the conversation by briefly describing different types of Irish poets and the complex emotions arising from the placement of Ireland within the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11505,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[320,213,341],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/european\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8555"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/european\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/european\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/european\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11505"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/european\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8555"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/european\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8555\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8559,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/european\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8555\/revisions\/8559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/european\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/european\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/european\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}