Café poets stealing a living from sad hacks
I am not going to give free publicity to the son of a bitch (who is also a Dub!), but it is necessary to give ye a bare taste of his composition:
smouldering,
but we haven’t got a care,
Because McCarthy with
triumphant style has
returned to County Clare.
O’Donnell of the boy band
looks and the storied
Twitter hash,
When asked what time
of day it was, proclaimed
Marty of the missing voice from singing of Clare Roses, left us with an autumn gem by proclaiming “Holy Moses”. And there is more, much more, and it is going down a bomb, and the equally hurtful truth is that I am both deeply hurt and jealous because I am technically the only professional wordsmith in the parish but the county, and indeed the country, is crawling with poets and songwriters and storytellers whose works, like O’Callaghan’s ... I call them Nescafé songs, composed in a few minutes ... make it virtually impossible for a professional hack to survive at all.
And that is the pure truth.
After years of experience, I could write a better ballad than that but, sadly, it would take me so long to craft it that the 2014 championships would have begun. I accept that with great pain.
I also accept the fact that anybody in my parish who needs any kind of composition, passes my door and go to bloody O’Callaghan and others of his amateur ilk.
And, especially after sporting triumphs, they are extremely numerous.
There’s another even more dangerous one in North Cork I am going to warn ye against in a moment, but it is the retired ordnance surveyor on my doorstep that is damaging my standing and reputation amongst my own. That hurts.
He has a track record too for these Nescafé works; the county is still singing his Brian Lohan tribute ballad a decade and more after the last Clare triumphs.
Furthermore, the Dub, who is the life and soul of every party, is even drafted in often as MC at the fabled Bunratty Medieval Banquets and that surely is a post that should be filled always by a Clare entertainer rather than a Blow In. I rest my case.
It is possible the mighty Seamus Heaney was driven to an early grave by the works of this incessant tide of gifted Nescafé poets and songwriters and storytellers. Their presence is certainly hastening my end too. It strikes me that another of the breed, another alleged friend by the name of Paddy Hynes from The Burren, effectively finished my radio career in Clare FM four years ago.
I would be flying high on the airwaves and then Paddy would come on the phone with monologues and stories and effortlessly steal the show away from me. They fired me in the end largely because of that. And there is another hurting truth.
Worse still, my friends, was something I accidentally came across last week when I picked up a book in an Ennis bookshop because there was a cowboy on the cover and it is years since I read a good western. On bringing the book home, however, I discovered I had been codded again. It is entitled Touched By Rhyme and contains no less than one hundred poems from Liscarroll-based farmer and publican Philip Egan. I am not going to give free publicity to him either, again out of impure jealousy, but I have to say that he catches all the elements of his community warmly and beautifully right across the scale.
But here is my warning. It is clear from the poems that Philip Egan, when pulling your Liscarroll pint behind the bar, may also very well be inserting you into his next poem.
A whole section in the book is devoted to the tradesmen and characters of Liscarroll and beyond, from the postman and the council labourer and the coalman and butcher to the schoolteacher, the creamery manager and the blacksmith.
It is the rhyming folklore of his people and place, highly readable and worthwhile, I have to say, but dammit I am never going to go into his pub, pay for my pint, and subsequently find myself captured in a poem maybe entitled The Wandering Hack or worse still. Ye have been warned. I can do no more.
