DUBLIN POUND CONFERENCE

I was in Dublin for the Pound conference 9th to 14th July. Lots of papers of course and with three strands running most of the time you get only a sample of what is happening. Ira Nadel's paper on Pound and the Artichoke (Pound meeting Beckett) had a spoiler from Seamus Heaney who also had something to say about this Paris encounter and Pound's dismissive remark to Beckett. Emily Mitchell Wallace was again focused on Byzantine Torcello and carved dolphins with lots of beautiful photos. I think that the Torcello mosaic is one of the most beautiful things I've seen and very different from everything else in Venice, so I was glad to have it displayed up on the big screen. I saw and heard a range of papers some of them really interesting by David Ewick, Catherine Paul, David Ayers, Jo Berryman, Richard Parker, Yoshiko Kita, Andrew Houwen, Ron Bush, Michael Kindellan (read out by Richard Parker) Giuliana Ferreccio, Annabel Haynes, Alan Golding, Daniel Swift, Philip Coleman, Robert von Hallberg, John Gery, David Moody and others. I took part in a reading with David Cappella, Desmond Egan, Kevin Kiely, Patrizia de Rachewiltz, Mary de Rachewiltz, John Gery, Biljana Obradovic, Jessica Pujol I Duran, Ron Smith, Stephen Romer, Daniel Maria Mancini, Jeff Grienensen, probably others, which demonstrated the enormous range of poets who apparently have an interest in modernism (though quite a few of them write as if it never happened). It was fun to meet up with friends and go out in Dublin for drinks and dinner. The district I was staying in, Temple Bar, is a kind of theme park of Irish nightlife, lots of live singers, pavements thronged with revellers many of them very tired and emotional. I had a day free after the conference, stashed my luggage and walked round the James Joyce sights including the James Joyce Centre and a trip on the DART train to see the Martello tower that opens Ulysses. I wished I'd taken some swimming trunks along as the forty foot bathing place looked like the best place to be. The photos above are the Martello tower at Sandycove, the interior of the tower as it is now, the sign for the Forty Foot Bathing Place, and the James Joyce statue with suitcases and litter bin by O'Connell Street.