SoundEye

Fergal Gaynor, born 1969 in Cork, gave up writing poetry in 1989. After reading a biography of Rimbaud he came to the conclusion that there were no poems to be written. For the next ten years he pursued third-level studies at Cork, Sheffield and Swansea – all this was to result in a doctoral thesis which used strands of thought in the work of D.H. Lawrence to examine histories of modernism – and performed with a number of musical outfits all prefixed with the name ‘Johnny’. Persuaded while at Swansea that there might still be unmade poems, he began writing and publishing in journals, almost always from Anglophone countries other than Ireland. In 2001 he became part of an interventionist group, ‘art / not art’, with Dobz O’Brien, which led not only to a number of education-based art-projects (the co-curation of the Cork Caucus in 2005 being the most substantial of these), but to further performances (most notably to a scattering of dogs and drunks in a medieval square in Pavia) and collaborative initiatives (e.g. ‘Portables’ 2002 – 2009). These days his writing activities include poetry, art reviews and articles, scholarly essays and dabblings in critical theory. In the last twelve months, in addition to marrying Marja née Tuhkanen, he has co-ordinated The Avant (ten days of the progressive arts) and helped with the organisation of SoundEye. He sings occasionally with a country band called Clarence Black.