The Cork International Poetry Festival was first held in 1997, to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of New Writers' Press, with both editors of that press intimately involved: Trevor Joyce as organizer, and both he and Michael Smith as participants. In the '60s and '70s NWP had extended the conception of poetry for an Irish audience, publishing volumes by Paul Durcan, Michael Hartnett, James Hogan, Anthony Cronin and the American, Jack Spicer, alongside Irish language poetry, and translations from international authors including César Vallejo, Jorge Luis Borges and Ingeborg Bachmann.
The Press went on to re-establish the Irish experimental poetry of the thirties with the active support of three writers of that generation, Samuel Beckett, Brian Coffey and Niall Montgomery. It was also the first Irish press to issue a volume by Patrick Galvin, thereby re-igniting his career. In all, NWP produced over seventy ground-breaking publications, many of them first books by now well-known Irish poets, doing much to contour the Irish poetic landscape as we now know it.
SoundEye continues that work, gathering poets who may usefully be regarded as Irish, whether by birth, ancestry or election, together with international practitioners whose writing opens new doors. We promote an Irish poetry alive and active in the wider world, and we bring home to Ireland practices, understandings, and bodies of work, which have grown up elsewhere, but may productively be rooted here.
Our emphasis is always strongly on poetry readings and performances. However, to focus the work of questioning and exploration we have always made space for provocative papers and discussion. Speakers have come from throughout the English-speaking world. It is envisaged that this element may in the future function as a separate Conference, held in parallel with the Festival, but distinct from it. Proceedings, including both papers and poetry, have been published by several presses, in both Ireland and the U.K.
The success of SoundEye is evidenced not only by the enjoyment of both audience and performers, but also in the resurrection of both New Writers' Press and Coelacanth, and the founding of Wild Honey Press, which has issued over forty titles in its first five years. Also notable is the number of festival regulars central to the recent Oxford Anthology of Twentieth Century British & Irish Poetry, edited by Keith Tuma, which radically redrew the map of contemporary poetry in these islands, challenging simplistic notions of mainstream and margin by juxtaposing the familiar with the strange, thereby augmenting the power of each.
