Ireland has a new craze gripping the public consciousness - it's called 'the great school poetry cull'. Where once line-dancing and incest were national staples, today we, the sohpistimicated, Irish get ourselves into a tizzy about the morality of art.Recently, TD Tony Gregory called for the lyrics of Tom Lehrer's happy little ditty 'Poisoning pigeons in the park' to be removed from either a textbook. Now, as a would-be writer and (bad) poet, I was rather saddened, since my top five poetic lines includes the wonderful:
'my heart just keeps quickenin' with each drop of strikenin'
Nevertheless, there we go, as cold blooded as Tom, luring unsuspecting poetry books to our bosom, a scissors concealed until it's too late for the hapless creature. Enter Mr. Gregory, as well informed as a dead badger at the bottom of a black sack.
Funny. I had thought lots of people had heard of this song, despite being relatively new (if you are living in 1952). Nevertheless, as enlightened as we are, even we have limits in this society of ours. Poet Cathal O' Searcaigh also got himself into trouble in Nepal, being a little too comfortable with teenage boys than the listeners of RTE's Liveline programme were comfortable with. Imagine Ireland's surprise - a poet in dodgy lifetsyle-choice shock! John Keats to reception please...
Whatever the merits of such hulaballoo, both the case of Lehrer and O'Searcaigh raise to the surface how we in Ireland deal with difference of any sort. Be it a difference of humour or of lifestyle choice, the instinct displayed in public discourse is to remove iconoclasts and their work from the canon of our admissible culture.
Lehrer, for instance, specialises in black humour, which fifty-odd years since it was first performed is still refreshingly dangerous. O'Searaigh writes some of the most extraordinary love poetry today (though I must admit not appreciating him during my Leaving Cert). What both have in common is their outcome. Comedy and poetry, like all artistic endeavour, may entertain. More importantly, however, it should cause you to question your acceptance of the reality as permitted by the mediocrity of consensus.
Worryingly, it seems we cannot accept this for our young people, who mainstream culture would only have exposed to a limited selection of cultural output. Young people are more adventurous than that, no more so than at the untamed frontiers of language.
It would be one more disservice to our society, if we denied them (and the rest of us) the opportunity to explore, debate and hold to account the world we have created for ourselves. This is not possible, if 1950s solutions to unsettling questions are allowed to prevail. Otherwise, we may just all quit and go line-dancing.
