Gathering for Hopkins

Curragh Plains, Kildare, Ireland — 2013 is Ireland’s year for The Gathering, a come-on for all Irish people to come home and celebrate with family and friends.

As my own luck-of-the-Irish would have it, I’m currently participating in the 26th Gerard Manley Hopkins International Festival being conducted at Newbridge College in Newbridge, County Kildare, an hour by bus or train from Dublin.

The Gerard Manley Hopkins Society runs the event from July 19 to 26, an eight-day long conference-fesival celebrating the poet whom every Filipino literateur associates with the famous literary term “sprung rhythm.” Also celebrated are his interests that ranged from poetry to painting, music, the arts, philosophy and conservation.

Artistic director Desmond Egan, an established poet with a score of books to his credit, together with The Hopkins Society president Conor Bowman, administrator Vivienne Abbott and a committee have arranged for a full schedule on a daily basis that includes lectures, readings, art and photography exhibition openings, music concerts, wine receptions and book presentations, a formal banquet, and field trips to nearby heritage sites such as castles, churches and abbeys.

For someone who grew up as a good Catholic boy under the guidance of beloved Benedictines, this was all joyfully predestined. Ora et labora led me to Granada in Nicaragua in February last year, and that’s where I had the good fortune to meet Desmond Egan. A pint each of Guinness, plus some wine and whisky later at an al fresco pub, and Des was inviting me to prepare a paper for the Hopkins Fest of 2012.

I couldn’t arrange for it early enough for last July, however, so that my participation had to be deferred. Well and good, too, as now it’s sheer four-leaf-clover coincidence that I get to do jigs and gigs in the year of the great Gathering.

At the reception and grand opening on Friday, July 19, Ambassador of UK Dominick Chilcott read three poems by Hopkins. So did his lovely spouse. Declaring the fest open was The Hopkins Society president Conor Bowman. In attendance were the mayors of Kildare and Newbridge.

A fascinating treat was the musical interlude featuring Tomas O Poil on the Uileann pipes, which looked like a smaller version of the Scottish bagpipes. Fellow delegate Ditas Antenor and I had the opportunity to inpect the strange-looking instrument before the opening rites. Tomas explained that it was played with the bellows stuck under the right armpit.

This occasioned a quick quip from Des Egan who had introduced us to the young pipes player: that the Irish had invented the instrument for playing with an armpit, introduced it to the Scots, who then played it with the mouth, and that the latter still hadn’t realized the joke after all these years, or make that centuries.

Outrageous quips also served as the staple whenever festival president Conor Bowman took the podium, as he did to open the 26th edition of what has been hailed as Ireland’s best cultural festival. The affable Conor has authored a book of humor, No Shortage of Long Grass, a copy of which he gave Ditas in exchange for the coffee-table book Philippine Style: Design & Architecture (copies of which were generously provided by Tourism Sec. Mon Jimenez for distribution among our hosts and newfound poet-friends).  

An art exhibit opening and wine reception with delightful Irish canapes followed the opening ceremony. Then we all motored to the Newbridge town center for dinner at the All Seasons Bistro on Limerick Street. At 8 p.m., with the summer sun still up for ever-lingering magic hour, we all repaired back to the college theatre for  the first of the celebrity music concerts, with the legendary Swedish classical pianist Hans Palsson rendering sublime pieces by Bach, Debussy, Mozart and Beethoven.

The next several days were packed with lectures from morning onwards, and poetry readings and music in the evenings. Hopkins experts worldwide presented brief papers on diverse aspects of the writings, life and times of the poet who has fascinated generations of poets and scholars not only for the innovations he introduced to the art of verse in English, but for many other themes and topics of interest that swaddled his life of art, poetry, music and religious philosophy and devotion in the late 19th century.

Douglas Grandgeorge of New York delivered the first lecture: “The Anglican Church at Hopkins’ Conversion.” This was followed by “St. Patrick and Hopkins” by Kevin McEneaney, also of New York. Patrick Murray spoke on “Hopkins, Newman and Ireland’s Third Language,” while Desmond Egan presented his paper on “Poets and Nostalgia.”

Books were launched later in the day, preceding the opening of an exhibit featuring the works of South Kildare photographers. That second night (with twilight occurring, or rather hovering about, between 9 and 10’oclock p.m.) was capped with more wine, music and poetry, with Conor Mahoney  on excellent guitar for such pieces as Romance de Amor and Cavatina, and the first batch of poets reading their own poems.

This group included Philip Brady, Shizue Ogawa of Japan, Donald Gardner of the Netherlands, Kevin McEneaney (poet laureate, Smithfield, N.Y.), Robert Simonisek of Slovenia, and Krip Yuson “(Pasig, The Philippines)” — as it said in the program.

It wasn’t until last Monday, July 22, that I presented my paper on “Hopkins’ Influence on SouthEast Asian Poetry.” Well, I couldn’t really cover the region, much as I had initially planned to include English-language poetry from Singapore amd Malaysia. Maybe I’ll do that in the future, for a longer paper. For a half-hour pesentation, however, the poets (and excerpted works) I could cite had to be limited to the following: Dr. Gémino H. Abad, Dr. Cirilo F. Baitista, former UP in Mindanao Chancellor Ricardo M. de Ungria (of course, this trio of “horrible crooks” or “dokiroks” will always top my list — as well as Jose Garcia Villa, Jolico Cuadra and Luisa A. Igloria, and for Singapore, Alvin Pang. 

I’ll share parts of that paper next week in this space. Suffice it to say for now that we’re enjoying our luck-of-the-Irish week, inclusive of serendipitous lodging at the Curragh Plains B&B run by Anne and Hugh Noone, terrific hosts who serve splendid full Irish breakfasts and, to our further delight, happen to tend a glorious garden  — the loveliest place imaginable to start mornings with coffee, while communing with the erstwhile rare summer sun.

We understand that the last fortnight of sunny, warm weather had not been experienced here since 1995. Maybe we brought it along for this week’s fabulous gathering to honor Hopkins and his “morning morning’s minions.”