Partisans of the Irish Pen Gather to Speak of Things Celtic

About 80 scholars will gather in Westchester next weekend to probe the grand condition of being Irish. Non-scholars who think the poems of Yeats make life easier to bear are also expected to attend.

The occasion is the western regional meeting of the American Conference for Irish Studies, to be held at Loyola Marymount University.

Talk, something the Irish are thought to do extremely well, will be the principal activity at the gathering. Papers of varying degrees of obscurity will be presented on aspects of Irish and Irish-American arts and experience, including an analysis of the very idea of Irishness and an account of the struggle earlier this century between Irish and Italian clergy for the souls of Catholics in New York City.

The ACIS is an academic association of literary scholars, historians, folklorists and others interested in Irish culture, according to John Menaghan, conference coordinator and an assistant professor of English at Loyola Marymount. But the meeting will not be all scholarly talk. Menaghan said it also will be a cultural event “and even, since it’s Irish, a social event.”

For those who would rather skip the scholarly papers and cut directly to the cultural and social part, there will be a reading by one of Ireland’s best younger poets, a play about the persistent tragedy in Northern Ireland and an exhibit, called “Speaking Texts, Silent Stones,” featuring photos of ancient sites in County Donegal and rare Irish books.

Poet Paul Muldoon, who has been praised by famed Irish poet Seamus Heaney as “the most promising poet to appear in Ireland in years,” will read from his work Friday.

Born in Northern Ireland in 1951, Muldoon now lives and works in Princeton, N.J., where he teaches creative writing at the Ivy League school.

Muldoon’s work includes “Why Brownlee Left,” “Meeting the British,” “The Wishbone,” a volume of selected poems and a long poem about the Celts and the American Indians called “Madoc: A Mystery,” published in 1991, that the poet himself describes as difficult and strange. Menaghan described Muldoon as an emerging literary force whose “Madoc” has caused a stir in English departments.

Muldoon emphasizes that Ireland is but one of his themes. “I write poems about everything imaginable and some things that aren’t quite imaginable,” he said during a telephone interview.

Certainly, the great Irish writers have influenced Muldoon. His favorite writer, he said, is James Joyce (another Irishman who chose to contemplate his native land at a distance). And he also treasures the work of Yeats. “I just had a daughter,” he said, “so I’ve been thinking about ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’ for the last month or two.”

But Muldoon’s tastes are decidedly catholic. “Frost is also a great writer and a great influence,” said Muldoon, who added that work as disparate as Polish and Eskimo poetry have left their mark. “The wonderful thing about poetry is that it has so many wonderful guises and forms.”

Menaghan believes that the stature of Joyce, Yeats and playwright-novelist Samuel Beckett all but guarantee continuing scholarly interest in Irish and Anglo-Irish literature. “If you look at what’s called modern British literature, most of the major writers are Anglo-Irish,” he said. Menaghan has taught Irish literature and drama at LMU and this fall will offer a new course on politics and literature in the Irish experience.

Loyola Marymount is planning a summer-in-Ireland program and the creation of an Irish studies program, he said.

The 38-year-old scholar thinks more and more Irish-Americans like himself are exploring the culture of the verdant, troubled country their ancestors left behind. He said he thinks the contemporary enthusiasm for multiculturalism is encouraging Irish-Americans to say yes to their roots.

“It seemed sort of provincial when I was growing up,” he said of his ancestry (he still has relatives in County Mayo). “When I got out to California, it began to seem exotic.”

Daniel Mornin’s play “Built on Sand” will be performed by Loyola Marymount students throughout the weekend. As Menaghan explains, the play deals with the escalation of tensions in Northern Ireland brought about by the Hillsborough Accord of 1985, a pact that brought the Republic of Ireland into discussions on the fate of Northern Ireland. Many unionists felt betrayed by the alliance between London and Dublin.

Mornin is from the north, Menaghan points out, and the playwright places his native land’s troubles in a universal context, with allusions to everything from ancient Crete to modern Beirut (which could be Belfast’s sister city, one character points out). The university has gone all out for the production, Menaghan said, even bringing in an Irish actor to help the students get the accents right.

Nobody knows why so many Irish writers can make words sing and bleed. Menaghan doesn’t. But he’s willing to speculate in a decidedly Irish fashion. “It’s magical.”