These poems are about two experiences I had at the Tyrone Guthrie Artists' Centre in Annaghmakerrig, Co. Monahan, Ireland during a month of creative magic. I have never had a more productive time of writing in my life, and I can only attribute it to the fairy forts in the woods nearby or the spirits of Yeats and Joyce infusing the hills and fields of this beautifully rural spot. Every poet who spends time at Annaghmakerrig ends up writing about it. While I was there, I was completing a cycle of poems about my Cuban grandfather and my Irish grandmother. I was not, I thought, really interested in writing poems about writing poems in Ireland. But later, after I had returned to Chicago, I found the notes I had taken when a local artisan, a violin maker, had paid a visit to the Centre and given a talk about his craft. The notes were meant for my daughter, who is a violinist, but as I read them, I found the germ of a poem.
          The other poem was about an evening after the communal meal at the Centre. Annaghmakerrig had been a quiet place until the arrival of a young group of chamber musicians scheduled to give a concert the following week. Suddenly, the gardens were filled with the sounds of musicians practicing during the day, playing music together in the afternoons, and laughing and drinking together in the evenings. I have to admit that it was a bit annoying to a few of the writers to have this noisy, young group invading our hermitage. In this poem the writers are doing what they usually do—standing on the fringe observing—in this case the exuberance of artists/performers who are, in their midnight swim, creating a kind of music outside of the control of their conductor but ripe for the writer's picking.