CelticMKE Milwaukee Irish Fest Irish Fest Scrapbook School of Music Summer School Ward Irish Music Archives
August 16-19, 2018
Milwaukee Irish Fest offers two poetry prizes annually; each award is $100. Winners will be announced at Irish Fest during the poetry events on Sunday afternoon, August 19, in the Hedge School in the Cultural Village on the south end of the grounds. Only the winners will be notified of the contests’ outcomes, during the first week of August; the winners’ names will be posted here by September.
The poetry awards will be given to the entries best reflecting Irish or Irish-American poetry traditions. Although the poems do not necessarily need to have direct Irish or Irish-American themes, the winning entries should have a culture/literary relation to either Ireland, Irish-America, or to Irish poetry.
Please read all instructions before submitting your form. Submissions that do not follow these instructions will be omitted from consideration.
Due to the large number of submissions, entries will not be acknowledged nor returned. Contestants are urged to write the mailing address clearly and to use a return address on the envelope.
Information on the Limerick Contest is located in the Information Cottage on the South end of the grounds in the Cultural Village. Entries will be available to fill out and drop off. Winner will be called following the festival.
In Drumcliffe Churchyard "...after a year or so, dig me up and bring me privately to Sligo." -- W.B. Yeats As I drive through County Sligo on a day in May, shafts of sun shift over the road like watered reeds. I stop at a churchyard long on my list where Yeats' uncle served as rector and approach the storied stone: Cast a cold eye ... I don't know what I expected -something more than this stark gray slate with its famous sparse epitaph Horseman, pass by -- a joke in this age where cars whine at high speed night and day on the road ten yards away. A horse could never safely cross. For an hour I wander randomly among these moss-encrusted crypts muttering my anti-climactic laments until that moment of knowing, when at last I notice the overhanging hulk, the holy dark mass of Benbulben risen beyond a tumbledown fence and that epitaph takes on a new slant. Beloved Benbulben his daily view, why mourn what is done? From the grave Yeats always could see what he most desired: the heaven whose flanks seduced him early, its blue repose the final poem that wrote him to lyrical rest. All others, pass by.
The Hag of Beara I knew her as goddess of the winter months, The Caillech, her story kept alive in Celtic lore, linked now to cliffs and cairns, kerbstones and rock chairs. An unexpected journey took me close to her final resting place, to the Beara Peninsula, where mountains cloaked in mist roll down to water-logged bogs, an untamed place of unsettled sky and wild seas, the place I chose to scatter my husband's ashes. Only after that leaving-taking did I search for the Hag, the goddess turned to stone. With borrowed wellies and walking stick, I found a trail carved into the edge of a cliff, the way down, a twisted path knotted with tumbled rock, the only sounds, waves crashing on the rock-strewn shore below, the cry of curlews circling above. She appeared when I could walk no further: a granite boulder covered with lichen, adorned with sea shells and silver coins, pictures tied with satin ribbons, paper hearts and notes tucked into every crevice. Some see a profile, long hair streaming in the wind. Others find a crouching figure looking out to sea. I saw the hunched back of an old woman, she who rules the winter of life, refusing to be silenced, her name erased. And I rested there, leaning into that mottled surface, then turned to go, leaving nothing behind but the warmth of my hand on her aged back.