Duelling banjo poets

Myself and Arnie Yasinski will be experimenting with our readings next year as a sort of duelling banjos set, one on one. Here are the first lines of the poems we plan to read from our latest collections Sentient and It's Okay. He's American. The poems fall easily into pairs: Arnie at nineteen finding out his girlfriend is pregnant, me at nineteen being harassed by a man in Paris; Arnie and his worst teacher ever, me being a teacher; Arnie meeting an Irish mammy for the first time (later he finds out she flushed unhappiness with drink), me being driven home from school by a man who I later learn was a drunk; Arnie's father, my father.....

Here are the openings of the poems:

She’s nineteen and late.  (Arnie)
In Paris. Au-pairing. (Alison)
We’re both just twenty in the photo (Arnie)
I can’t remember him collecting me from school  (Alison)
First trip to Ireland (Arnie)
I have the worst teacher ever (Arnie)
Some had been child soldiers (Alison)
From a distance, it’s him (Arnie)
As soon as I am old enough (Alison)
I block out the Detroit years (Arnie)
Done Scandi noir to death (Alison)
Out of prison for the workshop (Arnie)
The ticket inspector dismisses my passport (Alison)
A Vermont village (Arnie)
Going home —after three years of plague (Arnie)
This watery view by the last loch (Alison)
Irish swimmers bring their togs in a bag (Arnie)
I’m at the age I want to believe (Arnie)
I’ve tried it all, yoga… (Alison)
Waking to the aching query of your absence (Alison)
God isn’t dead yet, but has gotten old (Arnie)
On a golf course in the Adirondacks (Arnie)
I long to hold the poetry editor's... by Francesca Bell (read by Alison)
In an upholstered chair the editor sits (Arnie)

Pictured below — at the launch (at my home in Dun Laoghaire) of Arnie's second collection, God Lives in Norway and goes by Christie, in the summer of 2021 when everything still had to be outside. Deirdre Conroy who reviewed Crabbing and The Visual Time Traveller in the Irish Independent is on the left. 

#poetry #publishing #Irish #Ireland #21stCenturyRenaissance #ArnieYasinski