AS YOU might expect, the work of the poet John Hewitt looms large at the John Hewitt International Summer School in Armagh.
The week-long festival of culture and creativity took place last week, bringing a host of prominent writers and poets to the Market Place venue – among them Paul Muldoon, Tess Gallagher, Paul Brady, Dermot Bolger and Mary Costello.
In the studio theatre there was a prominent quote from Belfast man Hewitt on display: “This is my country. If my people came from England here four centuries ago, the only trace that’s left is in my name. Kilmore, Armagh, no other sod can show the weathered stone of our first burying.”
The summer school has been run by the John Hewitt Society (JHS) since 1988, with the aim of “promoting literature, arts, and culture inspired by the ideals and ideas of John Hewitt”.
Hilary Copeland of the JHS explains how the school has grown over the years and has moved from the Glens of Antrim to Armagh.
“The summer school originated as a tribute to John Hewitt a year after he died in 1987,” she says. “His friends and contemporaries wanted to mark his memory. Part of it came from Hewitt being a humanist and not wanting a traditional religious funeral.
“Instead of a traditional theatre, his friends all met at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast and marked his death, then the first summer school took place the following summer, with a number of writers and poets speaking at it.
“It was held in Garron Tower in the Glens of Antrim. It became an annual event and gradually evolved and so now it’s not just focussed on John Hewitt but incorporates a lot of things that he would have been very passionate about – how to get around the divisions in Northern Ireland by giving people the opportunity to talk about writing and culture and big ideas in a neutral territory.
“Eventually it outgrew Garron Tower and about 14 years ago it moved to the Market Place in Armagh.”
One poet who has had a long-standing involvement with the summer school is the award-winning Anne-Marie Fyfe. She hails from the Glens herself – Cushendall – but now lives in London and runs the popular `Coffee-House Poetry’ events at The Troubadour. She was at the summer school last week to read from her fifth poetry collection, House of Small Absences.
“I love coming to Armagh. I’ve been on the committee here for many years,” she says. “I remember John Hewitt being in Cushendall; the poet in the tweed jacket. He’s an important poet and he wrote so much about the Glens. Somebody was just asking me if Hewitt’s work can reach a younger audience and it can.”
Anne-Marie was a teacher before becoming a prominent poet, notably winning the 2004 Academi Cardiff International Poetry Prize.
“I suppose the poetry comes from being an English teacher. You watch all the greats and I suppose Emily Dickinson was a kind of catalyst for me. When I was growing up drawing and art was what I was most interested in. I still carry a sketchbook around and I like to draw buildings.”
For her, the late Seamus Heaney is easily one of the most influential poets. “Heaney is 'the great' for all of us; the way he writes about the past and landscape and nature. His death was one of the saddest things. He was one of the kindest men. You’d write to him and ask him things, like `What do you think of Emily Dickinson so I can tell my students?’ and he never said no.
“He was extraordinarily generous, because there were a million people asking him things. When he read here [at the summer school in 2008] in the large theatre it sold out and they put on a second night.
“About three months before he died there was going to be a memorial event in London for my previous publisher at Peterloo, Harry Chambers. I knew Seamus couldn’t come, but he knew Harry well. I wrote to him and asked if he had anything he would say about Harry that I could share and he wrote a four-page letter. That was the last time I heard from him.”
She also keeps going back to the work of Louis MacNeice. “He has a lovely poem about Cushendun where he talks about what’s happening inside the house and what’s happening outside the house and it was on the eve of war.”
Anne-Marie’s husband Cahal Dallat is also a poet and he was at the summer school last week too. While they brought up their children in London, they would bring them over to Cushendall each summer; the couple spent a few weeks there last month.
“I go back to Cushendall a great deal,” she says. “My parents have passed on so the house belongs to someone else now. You can still see it from the beach or the golf course. I launched one of my books in the golf club in Cushendall and everybody turned out and it was lovely. The people who are in the house now asked me to sign a book to the house.
“I’m very fond of Cushendall and it was a great place to have been a child and to have grown up.”
Many of Anne-Marie’s poems hark back to her childhood and in her talk she spoke about how we all carry memories and `sad absences’ of the houses we used to live in.
“Everyone has those deep-rooted memories that stick with you.”
Some of her new poems concern New York and also the new buildings at Ground Zero where the World Trade Centre used to stand.
“I felt very funny about the new towers going up but they are actually beautiful; there’s a mirrored effect that takes in the sky and there’s a blueness about them.
“I write a lot about flight and a lot of the poems are about travel and trains in particular. I love Grand Central. And I write a lot when travelling.”
She says she enjoys her role at Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour in London.
“I do workshops there and we have fortnightly poetry events. We had Van Morrison there recently. It’s also a music venue but it started in 1954 as a writers’ café. Stanley Kubrick had a table and Michael Portillo worked in the kitchen at one point.”
Her next book will be a mixture of prose and poetry. “It’s kind of an experimental memory work taking in Cushendall and the sea. I’ve wanted to do that for some time.”
The House of Small Absences is out now, published by Seren.
