9:45 - 10:00 10:00 ZOMBIE BLUES ~ POETRY SLAM /TALENT SHOW
Máighréad Medbh
Twelve Beds for the Dreamer - a poetry performance
“Watching Medbh perform her poems is to be hauled into a deeply feminine, sensual world of action
beyond the mere words.” (Fred Johnston, Books Ireland)
Máighréad Medbh was born in County Limerick, Ireland. Since the publication of her energetic and original first collection of poems, ‘The Making of a Pagan’ (Blackstaff Press), in 1990, she has become widely known as a performance poet, and her poems have been praised critically as texts as well as performance pieces.
Some of her early performances created a stir among the Irish public, with dramatised poems on issues related to sexuality and politics. Máighréad tries to create organically, often using the rhythm and feel of the experience to decide the form of the poem. Her work is at once intense, ironic, challenging and fiercely honest. She has performed widely, to consistently good reviews, in Ireland, Great Britain, the United States, mainland Europe and on the broadcast media. Máighréad’s other full collections are: ‘Tenant’ (Salmon Publishing, 1999); ‘Split’ (in ‘Divas!’, Arlen House, June 2003); and ‘When the Air Inhales You’ (Arlen House 2008). A CD, ‘Out of My Skin’, was produced in 2002, and her work has been included in a wide range of anthologies. Commenting on ‘The Making of a Pagan’, Andrew Swarbrick of the Oxford Times said, “The poems have a kind of verbal intoxication and head-long, devil-may-care adrenalin pumped up with the rhythms of rock, rap, and reggae.”
The sequence, ‘Twelve Beds for the Dreamer’, arose from Máighréad’s experiment in recording her dreams and relating their content and tenor to the moon’s monthly journey through the zodiacal signs. Would she, for example, dream of conflict when the moon was in Aries? Her interest in Astrology dates from 1999 and, while retaining a critical distance, she has found it remarkably accurate in mapping personality and life changes. She points out that many poets have been interested in astrology. Louis MacNeice wrote a book on the subject and W. B. Yeats was chairman of the Irish Astrological Association during the 1920s.
The oneiric experiment didn’t elicit any scientific conclusions, but her dreams were vivid and memorable and she wrote them as poems. As a narrative device, and as a testament to the value of astrology in her experience, she organized the collection according to the signs of the zodiac most appropriate to each poem. She added other poems of the night, half-light, bed, house and the internal dwelling-place. The complete sequence is fifty-five poems long and will be published later this year by Arlen House publishers, Galway.
The performance at Club Consciousness will consist of a presentation of the dream poems in the original order of the sequence: from Cancer to Gemini. The order is significant, moving from the sign of the mother, home and national history, to that of impermanence, communication and the media. Not only does this progression reflect the poet’s personal psychological journey during the period of composition, but it can also be seen as a response to social changes in her lifetime. As she writes in her introduction to the text: “We have been shunted from womb to weather, from home to homies, from bed to bedlam.”
“Máighréad Medbh’s poems nail themselves into your consciousness.”
(Orfhlaith Ní Fhoighil, review, Galway Advertiser)
