Simple Vidz

During the final weeks of university four years ago, i purchased a video camera after seeing a show at the National Student Drama Festival in Scarborough (which won best show) that used pre-recorded footage the two performers interacted with, flawlessly.

Ian Shuttleworth the theatre critic said it was easily the best of its kind he had witnessed and this was a spur for me, seeing the possibilities. I got the camera but hocked it to raise the ferry fare, because money was tight and I only thought it would be for a short time. And now after 48 months, i got it back and have finally arrived at the point i intended to four years ago.

Soon after coming to Dublin, I saw Seamus Heaney deliver a lecture on Patrick Kavanagh, the central thrust of which was the Kavanagh idea of a Poet's journey being the way "from the simplicity of going away to simplicity of return"; which has been a consistent and central critical plank in Heaney's own poetic.

He said that the development of a poetic soul is one whereby we start out knowing little and after a few years, rack up a lode of knowledge and reach a point where we think we are a bit handy on the poetry lark, and then, as we cast out into deeper intellectual pools, certainty deserts us as our learning increases and we realise that, in the grander scheme, the sureness we thought we were heading toward is merely an illusion and we know little.

And once this is accepted, there is a return, another cycle of learning with the simplicity of knowing we can never know it all. And eventually

"In the final simplicity we don't care whether we appear foolish or not" as Kavanagh said.

This is what we work towards, to follow our own star and dance as if no one is looking, like an actor in the magic circle who blots out the audience and behaves with a child-like simplicty.

And poetry being as it is, with nothing ever forced into the frame by a person's will -- indeed the more we try to engineer a poetic career with the resolve and style of a banker or careerist, the less likely it is to happen; so we trust what will be will happen and if it's meant to be, so be it, and now after four years delay, the gods delivered and the next space is ready. Live poetry on the vidz. Have a gander here