Foundation 14 – Tullamore Culture Scene Blooms Again – Blog
In the wake of the exhaust fumes of the Cannonball Run – about whom even I was unable to pen a verse rhyming or otherwise – we are heading into a busy night with Foundation 14 and Culture Night, as the aftermath of the Banagher Fair rumbles on, and the campaign to get it saved for next year comes together.
Tonight, as part of Foundation 14, the second Foundation festival after last years successful Foundation 13, the Scene of the Rhyme event that is regular in Joe Lees pub, but is in the Foundation 14 venue in the Tanyard today, features the Tullamore Rhymers as per usual, also Stephen Murphy and a plethora of new acts having their debut in Tullamore town.
Stephen Murphy was the author this year of the highly successful viral youtube video “Was It for This“, which brings our spiritual world and the mammonism of politics and corruption to a titanic clash in a set of verses, showing how much we have strayed from the ethos that once upon a time marked us as a people.
Talking of traditions and viral posts, both the blog post on the Banagher Horse Fair, and the original verse “Long May Horses Shit the Streets” have been getting a lot of interest online, showing where verse meets relevance there is a place for poets and poetry in the wider world, to some degree indeed poetry does matter.
Mankinds relationship with horses, and our supposed non eating of horsemeat – apart from in Burgers!!!! – is something that I have reflected on in verses such as “A Horse is a Horse“… as I said in that verse, they are less of a cow than they are mankind in my view.
Horses convey a sense of power and loyalty, and were the topic of a love song I wrote some years back, the words of which were put to music by Guillherme Schroeter, “I Loved Her, She Loved Horses“, and have proved to be an inspiration to writers throughout the ages. Indeed so powerful is the iconography of horses, that the Native Americans, for whom the horse was as new and as an exotic a creature as the White Man when the Europeans arrived over, we always think of them as being on horseback, and think of them with as much a twinship of sorts as we do the Irish Travellers.