Ian Duhig is one of our finest poets, writing work which draws on tradition and humour to generate new insights into human behaviour.
He writes: Working in Leeds, lurking in weeds the Surrealist Earnshaw would reply to friends from elsewhere when they asked what he was up to. A rueful acknowledgement of regional obscurity perhaps, but the City can be as obscure to itself as outsiders. The title of Patrick Nuttgens' book about the place was 'The Back-to-Front, Inside-Out, Upside-Down City' where he writes, The first and most constant problem with the City of Leeds is to find it. There never was a more faceless city or a more deceptive one. It hasn't a face because it has too many, all of them different. Of course, immigrants have always found Leeds and its old nickname of "The Holy City" was an anti-Semitic jibe by the same sort of people who now call it "Jihad HQ". The politics and art surrounding these issues will be explored at an event in Leeds City Art Gallery, which is what I will be involved in around National Poetry Day.
Such things have always interested me since I worked with homeless people. The City Art Gallery evening will link 'The Journey', Hughie O'Donoghue's exhibition there (I recently read at Dublin's DLR Festival 70th Birthday tribute to Seamus Heaney, where he was presented with a marvellous portrait by O'Donoghue) to the showing of Corinne Silva's film 'Wandering Abroad' and a part-performance of 'God Comes Home'. The last of these is a dramatic project involving some of poetry and prose, play scenes by Rommi Smith with interview footage by our Director Polly Thomas; it's title is a translation of the Yoruba surname of David Oluwale, whose tragic experience of God's Own County is detailed in Kester Aspden's prizewinning book 'The Hounding of David Oluwale', written after new material became available under the 30-year rule.
Following another local reading last night when I mentioned this, someone who had worked with the local police told me something of the abuse and isolation suffered by those involved in breaking the Masonry of the unofficial wall of silence. One hero of that story was 18-year old cadet Gary "Gazza" Galvin, whose family had not long been over from County Clare. I think of him at Leeds Bus Station, which looks out onto Millgarth Police Station where Oluwale endured so much cruelty. I usually look there too at the plaque for Tom Maguire (1866-1895) poet and heroic social activist, whose early death was a result of living in the same conditions as the people he campaigned for; in his blackly-humorous poem 'The Song of the Microbe', he writes ...the tanner and the skinner /And the City Council too /Will protect me from the mercies of the sanitary crew.
Heroism, of course, doesn't guarantee good poetry. Maguire's poem 'Dedication' takes as it's epigraph a standard editorial rejection slip and contains the line, Dare to be a minor poet! Daring or vain? Both and vain in both senses? Making my way around this Motorway City, I often find myself reflecting on how roadmakers used pulped books to help stick tarmac to the bed, wondering how much of it was poetry. I then usually comfort myself with a delusion based on the idea that obscurity is in the nature of true art; as the man said, its purpose is to make the world around us just that little bit more difficult to see.
