5E: WILLIAM WALL

Hi everybody!

here I am with the first post (actually the third if you’ve read the previous ones!)of our academic year. The author we dealt with in class William Wall who will be here in Pordenone at Pordenone Legge Friday 21st at 19.00 Loggia del Municipio.  This is his website where there are some short stories and poems you can download for free.

As regards Ireland and the GHOST ESTATES here’s the video we watched in class.

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The next link is to  an article by the RTE Ireland Spectre of ghost estates haunts Ireland. Read in carefully and watch the video. It gives a perfect picture of the devastating consequences of property speculation and the blindness caused by the economic boom during the CELTIC TIGER. It perfectly suits the poem we read Ghost estate.

I really hope you’ve enjoyed his poems and will attend his readings. It’s all by now. Bye!

Leave a free comment if you like 🙂

 

19 thoughts on “5E: WILLIAM WALL

  1. Cari amici di Pordenone,
    Non posso dirvi quanto mi ha commosso sapere che ci sono persone così lontane pensando mie poesie.
    I nostri due paesi hanno una lunga tradizione di arte, letteratura e cultura. Noi leggiamo Dante e leggete Joyce. La vostra cultura ha avuto una profonda influenza su Irlanda ed i suoi scrittori. I nostri tre grandi scrittori, Joyce, Yeats e Beckett sono stati profondamente influenzati da Italia.
    Anche se l’Irlanda è una piccola isola ai margini dell’Europa, ancora ci sentiamo vicini per l’Italia. Troviamo il simpatico popolo italiano. Abbiamo problemi economici simili, anche se la nostra sono peggio. Abbiamo anche una simile gioia di vivere, che spero ci aiuterà a resistere.
    Vorrei ringraziare voi e le vostre insegnanti per il tempo dedicato a guardare il mio lavoro.
    La mia visita a Pordenone è stato meraviglioso. Ritengo che sia il miglior festival letterario che abbia mai frequentato in tutto il mondo.
    Cordiali saluti,
    William

    Dear friends in Pordenone,
    I cannot tell you how much it moved me to know that there are people so far away thinking about my poems.
    Our two countries have long traditions of art, literature and culture. We read Dante and you read Joyce. Your culture has had a profound influence on Ireland and her writers. Our three greatest writers, Joyce, Yeats and Beckett were deeply influenced by Italy.
    Even though Ireland is a small island on the edge of Europe, still we feel close to Italy. We find the Italian people simpatico. We have similar economic problems, though ours are worse. We also have a similar joie de vivre, which I hope will help us to resist.
    I would like to thank you and your teachers for taking the time to look at my work.
    My visit to Pordenone was wonderful. I consider it to be the best literary festival I have ever attended anywhere in the world.
    Kind regards,
    William

    • Thank you so much for answering us. It’s been such a pleasure to read your great poems and also be able to attend your reading in Pordenone. My students as you can see in their comments have discovered a new reality & a great way to use poetry to raise awareness on social problems. So we’ll never stop being grateful to you.
      Laura

  2. Like a lot of my classmates I didn’t know about the presence of Ghost Estate in Ireland and about the Celtic Tiger! The poem by William Wall that we have read in class in my opinion expresses in the best way the desolation and loneliness of these empty places. Also the images we have seen are very impressive and they made me reflect about this issue. It’s incredible the number of houses that they are been built and now they aren’t inhabited. The really problem is the economic crisis. People have been affected by the blindness caused by the economic boom and they gave too much importance to money and to materialism. In this way now they are indebted and a lot of people haven’t a work, and are in a critical economic situation. The happiness is not made by money, but by other things like love, friendship, emotions. Probably if during Celtic Tiger the Irish people used in a better way their earnings, now they wouldn’t be in this bad situation.

    • Greed has always been a problem Giulia but You also hace to consider that after centuries of poverty, getting hold of a new incredible wealth can make you … dizzy. Furthermore the recession has hit not only Ireland but all the rest of Europe and the U.S.A.

  3. History shows that every civilisation, when facing a crisis, is bound to undergo changes that can be noticed in the use people make of buildings.

    Let’s think of the numerous harbours which have been abandoned throughout history when some shipping routes became dangerous and thus inaccessible; the hundreds of worship places which fell into disuse as soon as believers fled to escape being persecuted; in the past plentiful urban dwellings emptied when plague and other epidemics spread forcing people to move to the countryside or, on the contrary, a large number of country houses were abandoned because the political situation had threatened their safety.

    Nowadays we are frightened by “ghost estates”. These are groups of houses which were built, although few are still at early stages of construction, during the Celtic Tiger, the Irish economic growth that lasted from 1995 to 2008, but are now deserted. The idea of the abandon itself shouldn’t then come as a surprise. What baffles me is that leaving these houses doesn’t allow people to solve their problems, which are merely economic, but even makes them worse. These families have to find another place to live without having the possibility of spending the money they had saved and invested in the houses whose mortgages could not be paid off any longer.

    • What you’ve just written Sofia is absolutely right and I agree with the link you made to the history of urban planning. Thanks

  4. I only want to say that, apart from the fact that I have never imagined places like ghost estates exsisting, I have never thought how could be living in an uninhabited place too.
    The poem we read in class made me reflect on the importance of my neighbours and my fellow villagers! I’m just kidding, but maybe I wouldn’t have lived so peacefully so far if my neighbourhood hadn’t had some children to play with when I was younger, or if it hadn’t been such populated making me knowing everyone and consequentially trusting veryone.
    The poem impressed me for the sad life that people living in the ghost estates have to bear; they sustain lives without safe places to stay out also in the evening, without roots on the territory, without a fair childhood, without genuine relationships and without the freedom of, for example, open an activity near home, but only with suspicion, sadness and loneliness.

    • You’re dead right Ambra. It’s a treasure to cherish to have fond memories of playing in your neighborhood with your friends!

  5. This topic certainly was unexpected and incredible considering the fact that it comes from Ireland. I was very surprised by this news because Ireland, although is a state strongly marked by the economic crisis, however, remains an important state of the European Union. For me it’s even more unbelievable and shocking this kind of news because I come from a country like Albania that, obviously, doesn’t have the qualities that Ireland get, and also Albania was penalized even more in its development by the economic crisis, but this problem doesn’t exist as in Ireland. All those beautiful houses were built to provide a better future for many families and for their children, but now those houses are impossible to own because of the high costs. All that work, money and time has been lost in a moment! How sad is this??? so much!!!

  6. This activities has open at me a world, a window to a serious problem that this is not sufficiently considered. I never think about this aspect of our society, maybe because in Pordenone there aren’t so many examples; there are a lot of houses or apartments that are unhabited but I don’t thinking that this freak can be too big. In my opinion will be a good think if we will start to restore most old or abandoned houses and reduce the construction of new homes.
    About William Wall I like his poems, especially I like the second that we had read in class, “Flight”, I think that it is full of pathos and that transmit me a strange sense of empty and sadness, probably because i think that tears are the most sincere way to express what we feel.

  7. This topic impressed me a lot.
    The other day I wasn’t in class and some classmates told me about this problem. But after have read the article and have watched the video I could understand the situation.
    I never heard about Celtic Tiger and all this abandoned houses. The situation seems to be very sad, expecially for the few people that live there with no neighbors.
    In my opinion this feeling of desolation and sadness is well expressed from the poem of William Wall. In Ghost Estate the reader can perceive that the writer is really closed to this problem.
    Here in Italy there are a lot of not finished buildings, like hospitals, malls, flats, but in this case people spent money for big projects, that for some unknown reasons, are stopped. These episodes are very common in our country, but the majority of the time people prefer to criticize instead to find a real solution.
    In Ireland the situation is almost the same and the people are desperate.
    In my opinion demolishing the houses isn’t the best idea. If they can’t sell them, they can try to use these houses for another pourpose. But unlike from Italy, the Ireland government is working seriously on this problem and only doing this they will find a solution.

    • It’s great that you could follow the lesson on the blog even if you were absent:). I also disagree with destroying what has been built, such a waste of energy & money! It’s certainly an issue that needs dealing & solving. Hope the government will take care of that.

  8. The problem of ghost estate is widespread and the data are shown in the video are not positive. Unfortunately, even in Pordenone there are some abandoned places that are used by drug dealers and where delinquency has taken over. It is sad to think that there are buildings completely empty and that no one controls, when in fact they can be used in any other way, perhaps by accepting the people living on the streets and help them to find a job

  9. I’m very astonished by ghost estates because I didn’t know about their existence!!! Well, I learnt about ghost towns in the Far West from cartoons and films, I heard in the Italian news about some abandoned buildings, but I’ve never caught information about these “strange” and horrible neighbourhoods!!
    In Italy we always discuss about our problems and we always criticize everything about our state instead of looking around ourselves (aren’t we selfish people?), there are countries with the same problems and we could learn how to resolve them from watching these nations!!

    • No place is perfect, problems are everywhere. Perfection does not exist but we should work ro make our world, mind not only our neighborhood or country, a better place and we can learn from others’ errors.

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