Where poetry meets oh-no-etry
Dublin is renowned as a city of poets. It's said that you can't walk down Grafton St without some high-minded disciple of the Muses flinging some garbled bit of Patrick Kavanagh in your face and then looking for the price of a pint for his trouble. This reputation is partly justified. There are vanloads of poets in this town and all too eager to entertain the susceptible visitor, particularly the attractive female visitor. The difficulty is that for many of these tormented geniuses poetic talent is more or less a symptom of a natural inability to talk to women.
Bearing this in mind, however, if you feel yourself in need of the sweet balm of poesy, there are a few places you can go to get your fix. The format and location of poetry events depends unfortunately on the organisational skills of poets, and it is a common trait among many Dublin poets to regard organisational skills as something rather distasteful and low. Still, there are one or two places where an ordinary human being can go to enjoy some verse without being made to feel like a visiting psychiatrist.
The most vibrant of these currently is in Carnival on Wexford St (five minutes from St Stephens Green) where every second Wednesday, host Mike Igoe (a talented and so far un-jaded young poet) organises The Naked Lunch. As with all these things, the quality and variety of the poetry (and occasional singer-songwriter) varies enormously, but there are a few regulars who are always worth listening to - Igoe himself as well as figures such as Sweeney, Birch and Raven, all soi-disant legends in their own lunchtime. Bring your own verse and read or else get disgustingly drunk and heckle. It's all performance art...
