On February 4 in Room 100 of the Science building, RWC hosted a poetry reading by Irish poet Eilean Ni Chuilleanain. Eilean is the author of several collections of poetry,including “The Second Voyage,” “The Magdalene Sermon,” and “The Girl Who Married the Reindeer.”Eilean’s mother was a children’s book author, so while growing up Eilean loved to read. Her family was multicultural; in her house in Ireland, when she was younger, there were four different languages spoken: Irish, French, Latin, and English.
During the session here, she read for nearly an hour, including many poems from her different books. After she was through reading the poems, she was asked many questions. First she was asked, “Why is Ireland so small with so many poets?”
She replied, “This is a question with a number of answers. There was a big explosion of poetry from the sixties on. Another good reason could be international things happening in the world and Ireland was responding in its own way. There was also a lot of poetry getting published; whereas people who were writing short stories were not getting their material published as often as the poets were because those who were publishing short stories were trying to make more money.”
Then she smiled and laughed with a sigh, stating that “Maybe it’s just something that our culture does.”
Another question asked during the session was “Do you write anywhere or do you have to be in your own space and comfortable with the environment?”
She answered this question with a few short answers, like “No, I don’t have to be in my own space to write poetry. Things around me inspire me, and often dreams will inspire me too. I have to write down things as I see them or I will never remember them. My poems often start on the backs of envelopes, or even on the corners of pieces of papers. In fact, when I first thought of the idea and started my poem “Crossroads,” I lost it and then one year later I found it, and finished it.”
The session was interesting and exposed the audience to a very different culture from ours.
Ms. Chuilleanain gave everyone present a little taste of the multi-cultural world during the session, and to make things a little more interesting, she even spoke a few words of all of the different languages that she had grown up with to let the audience hear the major differences and some of the major characteristics that they all share.