The Poems

Introduction
Poets sometimes make odd observations. I think this poem qualifies. It gives us a series of moments featuring the colour pink. Many of these could hardly be expected by any reader. Clearly, only this poet could have written this poem, or even anything in this ballpark. Another writer would surely develop the theme in a different way, but even if he or she took the same approach, the elements chosen could not be the same.

We expect domesticity from the title, yet that domesticity only arrives halfway through the poem. Instead, it deals in colours and associations, hinting at personal memories. It could be considered a poem of perception. Not only perception connected with images, but also in a more general, intellectual sense. The everyday human perception of animal flesh, for example – our carnivorous eyes transform the flesh of a few unfortunate species into meat.

The tone of the poem lulls the reader into a sense of security, with its sedateness. Then, a certain word (I won’t spoil it here if you haven’t read the poem yet) – as much the sound of the word as its meaning – cuts into the reader’s consciousness, jolting him/her out of any complacent readerly notions of “I know how this poem will end”. It shows how important it is to surprise the reader, a principle which should surely be applied to every art form.

Cooking chicken
Pink is the colour of life
of new babies’ wet heads
and open screaming mouths.

Pink is the rose hip of a woman at the heart
of what’s between her hips
and the tip of my tongue between bud lips.

There’s the hint of pink on daisies
when they open their petals to say
hello to the birth of a new day.

But pink is also the colour of death
as the knife slides between the flesh
and separates it into food.

Pink is a suggestion of sickness when I pierce the skin,
dissect the sinews, glimpse the tint of it and turn
it to the heat to kill the pink and the possibility.

It’s the quiver of the comb atop feathers,
and the neck as it’s sliced from the body
by the executioner’s axe.

It’s the colour of cunt
and the hint in the sky
when the cock crows.

(“Cooking Chicken” was first published in Banshee Lit Spring 2017 issue.)

About Alice
I was born in Dublin and reared in Co. Mayo on the West coast, I currently split my time between the two. I hold a BA in English Literature and Philosophy from Trinity College Dublin. I’m starting a Masters in Writing in NUI Galway in September 2017.

My poems have been published in many journals and newspapers, including; Headspace magazine, The Fem literary magazine, Poetry NI Holocaust Memorial Anthology, Poethead, Icarus, Headstuff, The Galway Review, The Sunday Independent, Hungry Hills Wild Atlantic Words Anthology, Skylight47, Boyne Berries, A New Ulster, Live Encounters Magazine, The Ofi Press, The Stony Thursday Book, Banshee Lit, The Pickled Body and The Irish Times. I am included in Poethead’s indices ‘Women Poets’ and ‘Contemporary Irish Women Poets’.

My work has been shortlisted for several competitions, including, the Annual Bangor Poetry Competition 2016, Hungry Hills Wild Atlantic Words Poetry Competition 2016 and the Over the Edge New Writer of the Year Competition 2016. I was commended in the Jonathan Swift Awards 2016. I was longlisted for the Cinnamon Press Pamphlet Prize 2017.

I was the assistant editor of Looking at the Stars, a limited edition anthology of Irish writing edited by Kerrie O' Brien to raise money for the Rough Sleeper Team of the Dublin Simon Community. The anthology sold out and raised €21,190.29 for Dublin Simon Community.

My debut play ‘The Passing’ was staged as a part of ‘What’s the Story’ at the Liberties Festival 2016. It went on to be performed at Cruthú Arts Festival and Temple Bar Culture and Arts Festival in the same year. The Passing will be performed as a part of Little Shadow Theatre’s New Irish Playbook in May 2017. My second short play ‘And Now We…’ was chosen for ReActors at Cruthú Arts Festival 2017.

This year I am a writer in residence with SICCDA (South Inner City Community Development Association).

My first book of poems, a pamphlet called Flower Press will be published in 2018.

For more details visit aliceekinsella.com, Facebook.com/AliceEKinsella, or follow me on twitter at @AliceEKinsella

Interview
I’ve heard it said a few times that poets notice things that others don’t notice. I’d say it applies to this poem, anyway. Would you agree or disagree (both in relation to this poem and in general)?

I do agree, but I’m not sure it’s some innate ability of perception. I think poets train themselves to notice the details, to see the world in a different way.

In this poem I think the details are all things that anyone would notice individually, once they look, they have to be for the poem to make sense. It’s the connection between these things that makes the poem. With this poem it was very much about noticing details. I tend to be rubbish at titling poems, and this poem is called ‘Cooking chicken’ because that’s exactly what I was doing at the time. I was cooking chicken for the first time (I’m a vegetarian) and as I was trying to avoid poisoning the person who would be eating it, I noticed the pink in the middle and the lines started to pool in my mind. I wrote the bones of this poem there and then, (at the dinner’s expense). So there is definitely an element of noticing things in a different way. Poets are trying to present their subjects in a new way, that’s what makes their poems interesting, so we must always be on the lookout for new images and ideas.

Colours/the senses clearly play an important role in this poem. How important are they to writing?

Many great poems are rooted in and successfully portray profound ideas about life, but, for me anyway, what brings a poem home is its connection to the physical world. I think poetry is about making the personal universally accessible, and this accessibility depends on the reader being able to feel their way around a poem, to know what it is to be in the world of the poem.

If the reader can visualise what the poet is describing, they can be brought on a much more evocative journey. And like you said, it’s not just visual, I try my best to evoke as many of the senses as I can. What we’re doing as poets a lot of the time is trying to capture a moment on paper, and the thoughts and feelings that might go along with that moment. How we experience things through our bodies is very important to our minds.

It’s not exactly typical for a poem which begins with babies’ wet heads to give us “the colour of cunt” near the end. Do you think it’s particularly effective or important to surprise the reader?

I think it’s a fairly natural conclusion, the babies don’t come from under cabbage patches after all!

I think surprising the reader can be important, it certainly makes a poem more memorable, but, when writing the poem I never thought of the ending as all that shocking. It just seemed like a natural ending. If it’s confronting people with a word that makes them wince, maybe they should be asking themselves why?

Saying that, I’d never put something in just for the shock value, I think every word in a poem should earn its place. ‘Cunt’ earned its place in this poem, it’s not a word I throw about and thought carefully about its inclusion here. It’s included here for many reasons, both technically and thematically. The fact that this is now what my mum calls my ‘rude poem’ is just an added bonus.

Similarly, you’ve given us associations here that we wouldn’t expect (pink as the colour of death, which is unusual, as we’d usually associate pink with stereotypical “girliness” or femininity, and death is usually linked with the colour black).

I’m not sure what the question is here, but going back to what I was saying previously, I think it’s the poet’s job to present things differently. As long as the new associations make sense, I don’t worry about challenging old associations.

The blackness of death is tied up in the spirit and mourning. When I think black and death I think funerals, black horses, hearses, and the great abyss after death. The death that comes into this poem is largely physical. It’s a reminder that in some way the execution of a chicken is the same as our own death. We’re animals too. It is not the death of the mind, it’s the death of the body.

I would argue that the pink in this poem is associated with femininity as much as death. Femininity, or girliness, has different meaning for different people, and when you say girliness I get the feeling you mean lipstick and lovehearts. Pink being a girly colour at all is linked to our anatomy when you think about it, little pink love hearts looking like a woman’s bum and all that. With this poem I wanted to take the idea of that delicate flushed cheek sort of pink, the kind you might associate with a daisy or a new-born, and remind people that it’s the same colour as the flesh of an animal.

I do feel that this is a very feminine poem in that sense, but perhaps not in the usual associations with ‘girliness’. I don’t see it as delicate or gentle, but bloody and sexual and exploring the close line between birth and death, beginning and endings. I am not trying to take pink away from femininity, I more see pink as a common image between femininity and death. That’s more about what femininity means to me than love hearts and pink dresses.
The colour in this poem makes a connection between things that are already linked, it ties the female experience to death. Birth, death, creation. Or at least, that’s what I hope it does.

Why do you write?

The money mainly.

Just kidding. Goodness, so many reasons. I’ll have to be careful not to let this answer get too confessional.

My friend and I were talking about this recently. You know that old idea, if a tree falls and no one is around to hear it does it make a sound? Well, if a writer isn’t writing with the purpose of communicating an idea to an audience, then what is the point in writing? (We may have been a little drunk when we came up with that comparison.)

Anyway, I was arguing that the main purpose of writing, the reason I myself write, is communication. I think literature, be it poetry or prose or theatre or whatever, allows us to understand other peoples’ lives in a way we couldn’t otherwise, it helps us to feel empathy. We learn so much about life, about each other, through reading. I was raised to question everything, and I do that through writing now. When I decided to become a writer, and by that I mean try to follow the path professionally, this was a large part of my reasoning. To be able to ask questions and communicate my thoughts on them. And I’m not talking about a political agenda or anything like that. Even when we talk about art for art’s sake we’re still communicating an idea in that concept itself. I’m talking about how any piece of writing holds an idea or some moral, some hope of wisdom. I’ve always written to explore things and question things and try to convey my thoughts in an artistic manner. I suppose what I mean is that I do believe literature has a hugely positive effect on people’s live, and I just want to add my drop to the ocean.

And that, or something to that effect, something about empathy, understanding, and communication, was going to be my answer. But it’s only half of an answer, it leaves too much to be desired… desire itself, for one. It’s the explanation of why I became a writer, how I justified to myself spending every day doing the thing I love most.

When I started writing, and I mean not really writing I wasn’t putting pen to paper, rather when I started creating stories, I was a child. I think people are all storytellers, we even give our lives the structure of a story with beginning middle and end, I think it’s the way we make sense of the world. I’d rarely write a poem that isn’t a part of a larger narrative, not even intentionally, that’s just the way my brain works. Anyway, when I started writing, I never did so with the hope of anyone understanding or anyone seeing or anyone even knowing I was doing it. It was for the joy of it.

When I started writing poetry I was older, nineteen maybe, and it was almost like therapy. I wanted to find my own answers. I use poetry to take little freeze frames of life. Life is so fleeting, I’ve always had that in the back of my mind, and writing, poetry in particular, is a way of holding onto pieces of life, to appreciate them. Writing can be such a physical joy. Even now, when it’s the day to day job and it takes up a lot of time, and like anything you’re dedicating your life to it can get stressful, it’s only when I’m completely alone with the pen and the paper that that stress gets taken away. I think it is a kind of euphoric feeling to get something down that you’re actually happy with, to figure something out through language, to completely capture an idea or feeling or experience in something that’s so personal, it’s the only time that I’m completely calm… I think.

If you had one piece of advice for a writer, what would it be?

Hmmm, I never feel qualified to give advice in case it leads someone in the wrong direction. There’s advice I wish I’d been given, advice I want to give, and then advice people probably want. I don’t even know if there’s any overlap between the three.

I’ve noticed a lot of the poets previously featured on this site say ‘Read’. I’d agree with that. Read everything, read in the medium you write, read in other mediums, read things you love, read things you hate, read poetry, read fiction, read philosophy, read the bloody dictionary.

Then put the book down and pick up the pen.

One of the most important pieces of advice I’ve ever heard, and I can’t remember where from, is to know when to ignore all the advice, if you’re getting words on the page you’re already doing it right, because that really is half the battle. It’s easy to forget that sometimes I think.

Be honest, I suppose. To your readers and yourself.

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#36 "It's All Relative" by Kate Ennals

1/8/2017

Introduction
If the Monty Python team were to attempt a love poem, it might turn out something like this. Though this poem might be more of a portrait than an actual love poem. It provides a quirky snapshot into a relationship, twisting the tropes of love poetry to comic effect. Instead of comparing the subject’s hair to something grand, we get diarrhoea. He doesn’t devote his time to valiant deeds, but rather “wanks with divine precision”.

The tone is clearly playful. Maybe the author also meant it to be satirical, taking the piss both of the subject (her lover, it seems) and of the clichés that riddle love poetry. It functions as an in-joke that the average reader can feel privy to, using extreme exaggeration to keep the reader hooked.

Portrait poems are often slow, contemplative things. This poem, however, is full of colour. Though no dramatic event occurs, it feels like a dynamic piece of writing. We’re wondering what image will come next. What this comic hero will do to entertain us. How the poet will end the poem. That basic element of surprise is perhaps the foundation of almost all good writing. And you don’t need drama when you have that essential skill to hand.

It’s All Relative
His hair is diarrhoea from the arse of a gull
That he blow dries into corn doll drills
In his hamster cheeks he stores cake
Dolly mixtures swimming in soft poached egg
He has the look of Abe, a whiff of Dave, the feel
Of Hades. He wanks with divine precision
In an obsequious manner
He wears Ralph Lauren in bed, Paul Smith in the kitchen
His aniseed eye reeks a lofty derision

“Of what rhyme you now?” he sits back with a sigh
“Of you, my dear,” I say in reply.

About Kate
I am a poet and short story writer and have published both in a range of literary and online journals (Crannog, Skylight 47, Honest Ulsterman, Anomaly, Burning Bush 2, Ropes, The International Lakeview Journal, Boyne Berries, North West Words, etc.). My first collection of poetry, At The Edge, was published in 2015. I have lived in Ireland for 25 years and currently run poetry and writing workshops in County Cavan, and organise At The Edge, Cavan, a literary reading evening, funded by the Cavan Arts Office.

Before doing an MA in Writing at NUI Galway in 2012, I worked in local government and the community sector for thirty years, supporting local groups to engage in local projects and initiatives. My blog can be found at kateennals.com.

Interview
What was your aim with this poem? Was it simply to create a surreal, unusual portrait of a person? (For some reason, it reminds me of a Cubist portrait.)

Yes, it does have a surrealist feel to it, doesn’t it? I didn’t have an aim, exactly. I wanted to play with metaphor which I don’t often do and so I chose someone whom I know well to describe and this is what emerged. I haven’t shown him the poem!

Can I ask how the title relates to the poem? Does it suggest that perception is paramount? Are you perhaps even suggesting that this could be a love poem, that the features are worthy of a love poem when you look at it from a certain perspective?

I’m not sure about a love poem though I think the poem does demonstrate a close relationship. I wondered what the poem’s title might be and it kind of spluttered its way on to the page. The person is related to me, so the title seemed to work. We all see things differently, and our own views or perspective will often change from one instant to another, at least mine do. Indeed, I have written a different, adoring poem about the same person. I think one of the joys of writing poetry is the discovery or exposure of a perspective that maybe you have not consciously thought about and as a reader in finding an experience or an emotion that you have felt expressed in a poem. Poetry makes you realise that you are not alone!

Irreverence and playfulness are great traits in a poem. Much better than the kind of pomposity that some associate with poetry. (Not that the figure in the poem is necessarily a reverent figure, but the fact that he’s the subject of a poem gives him some kind of importance.) As an art form, do you think poetry is more suited to the serious or the playful and humorous?

That’s another joy of poetry…it can be serious, irreverent, beautiful, humorous, even menacing but, if it captures its truth, its essence, a poem is always a joy to read and to write. Poems take people on journeys. They are the perfect vehicle for expression and, to continue the metaphor, can take the form of any transport: a train, a bus, a speed boat, a pair of roller skates or even shanks pony! There is no right or wrong in poetry. It can go anywhere by any means.

There’s no rhyme throughout, but your poem finishes with a rhyming couplet. Was there any particular reason for this change? And what qualities do you think the combination of rhyme and free verse can give to a poem?

I like the sound of words and many of my poems use alliteration, assonance (the rhyming of the vowel sounds) and consonance (the rhyming of the consonant sounds). In fact, I think there is a fair amount of rhyme in the poem, but its internal rhyme and half rhyme. Gull and drill, cake and egg, Abe, Dave, Hades. The rhyming couplet at the end moves the poem out of perception into the here and now and the speech mirrors and concludes the assessment. The rhyme makes it more emphatic.

While I like rhyme, assonance, and consonance, when I write, I do not bear structural issues in mind. It would impede my poem. Often my use of rhyme is unintended but I do think sound is important. While a poem doesn’t need to rhyme (and most of mine don’t have the traditional verse and rhyme that you would find in a typical Shakespearean sonnet), it is a pleasure when it does. But most important is the journey the poem takes you on and its rhythm.

Why do you write?

Because I love it. Writing enables me to clarify what I think. It takes a tangled confusion and creates order. It allows me to think and reflect. In his poem, Advice to Writers, Billy Collins reflects on the writing process. He ends with ‘tiny sentences like long rows of devoted ants that followed you in from the woods.’ It’s a fabulous poem. My words are my army of industrious ants bringing order and meaning to my life.

If you had one piece of advice for a writer, what would it be?

Write every day and read widely. Writing creates its own rhythm which only gets stronger with practice. Reading provides you with a wealth of new material, stimulates the mind, strengthens the language, and galvanises the brain. And turn off the TV.

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#35 "Numbers" by Vinny Steed

1/7/2017

Introduction
There has been a lot written about the discovery of the remains of 796 babies in the septic tank of a former Mother and Baby Home run by the Bon Secours nuns in Tuam, County Galway. As well as articles, news reports and other forms of communication, many poets have addressed it in verse. Vinny Steed’s poem comes at the subject in an unusual way. It’s very stark, deprived of detail. And the mention of the gruesome discovery only comes at the end.

Steed lulls us into the poem with interesting facts about acupuncture, science and other fields. He chooses the less obvious approach of curiosity whereas many would seek to wrestle the reader’s attention via indignation or horror. It’s a quiet, measured poem with a scientific flavour.

You could also say it’s a poem of patterns. Unfortunately, the poem ultimately shows us that the most despicable aspects of human nature – here, disregard for the lives of others, especially others we attach a label to – is a pattern which repeats itself throughout history.

Numbers
We find life in numbers
In acupuncture, there are seven-hundred
paths of energy in a human body
A human eye can detect seven-hundred
tints of colour in a rainbow
but in this septic reality
we uncover
seven-hundred strong
baby corpses
and
when we tentatively scrape beneath the surface
we find death in numbers.

About Vinny
I am a 36 year old from Galway work who divides his time between writing and the banalities of retail. I have work published abroad and at home. Some of my work has featured in the Galway Review, Headstuff, Skylight 47, Crannog, Into the Void, Tales from the Forest, All the Sins, Ofi Press magazine and Ropes 25th edition. Some of my poems are soon to feature in Windows 25th edition and in Cinnamon Press.

I have been long listed for the 2015 & 2016 Over the Edge poetry competition and short listed for the 2016 Doolin poetry competition. Most recently I was long-listed for the Cinnamon Press debut poetry collection. One of my poems was also nominated by Into the Void for the Pushcart Prize. I attend poetry workshops in the Galway Arts Centre.

Interview
Can numbers or mathematics be poetic? If so, how?

Why not? I think some of the best poetry can be found in the most mundane subjects. This is not to say that numbers and mathematics cannot be exciting. The Fibonacci sequence for example is a series of numbers where a number is obtained by adding the two numbers before it. The most interesting aspect of this for me is that this sequence exists in nature particularly in botany such as an unfurling fern or in the arrangement of leaves on a stem. Since poetry deals so much with the theme of nature they have become inextricably linked, then so too is mathematics and poetry.

You tackle what some might call a “political” or “human rights” issue in this poem, but you’ve placed the frame of numbers around the issue and twisted it slightly. Do you think such political or human rights poetry typically works best when it tackles the subject head-on or when it comes at it askew?

To give a politician’s answer on this one I would say that I think both methods can be effective. Anna Swirszcynska has a simple yet hard hitting poem titled “He was Lucky” that deals with Nazi Germany occupation and how one man escapes with his life. If delivered correctly I think the head-on approach can have a lasting impression on the reader. Similarly, I feel that intertwining a difficult subject with another theme can generate discussion and allows the reader to maybe think about a topic in a different light. That was my aim with this poem as I felt that it would be a topic that would already have much written and discussed about it.

You’ve used very spare, stark language to reflect the harrowing subject here. Did you consider a more detailed approach? What are the advantages of avoiding a great deal of detail in a poem?

It all depends on the subject matter. For me stark language was a necessity in order to reflect a stark reality. I would say that less can be more when it comes to poetry. This not only applies to writing about bleak or morbid subjects. Indeed, one of my favourite poems is by C.P. Stewart titled The Falconer. It is a short poem that beautifully captures a moment of lust between a man and a woman. There is not a huge amount of detail in the poem but the reader is perfectly placed in that scene and the mental imagery it evokes is fantastic. Letting the reader fill in the detail themselves often makes for varied and interesting thoughts on the same poem.

It’s been said that one death is a tragedy, while the death of many is a statistic. Maybe that reflects how the human mind fails to connect with, or focus its attention on, large or complex things. Are creative works especially equipped to focus our attention on important things? If so, why?

Technological advance has led to our desensitisation on many humanitarian issues. We are bombarded with news of human catastrophes daily. It is a well-known fact that our brains are hardwired to forget the ritual and mundane of everyday so that we can concentrate on more important factors. Unfortunately, I think that lack of connection that you speak of is a direct result of the intravenous line that has been created due to media overload. I think creative works can break this line and therefore has greater potential at refocusing our attention. Creative work has the ability to create empathy (something that I feel technology cannot ever achieve).

Why do you write?

For me poetry is like putting the pieces of a puzzle together. When all the pieces come together it can be very satisfying – all too often the pieces might not fit but great enjoyment can be found in simply attempting it. If the finished puzzle appeals to other readers then it is an added bonus. Creating the time to write is in itself a form of meditation. You can be completely immersed by it and drowning in words is never a bad thing!

If you had one piece of advice for a writer, what would it be?

Read everything around you from the bizarre to the thought provoking to the ridiculous. Everything you read and enjoy, ask yourself questions about it. What makes this piece of writing interesting? Why am I drawn to it? The more questions you ask the more you realise how little you know. As the famous philosopher Kierkegaard once said “The surest of all stubborn silences is not to hold one’s tongue but to talk”.

Poetry editing available here

Online writing classes coming soon
Email trevorcon@gmail.com for details

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#34 "Honestly" by David Lohrey

1/6/2017

Introduction
Poetry is associated with civility in many people’s eyes, but here, it attacks unnecessary civility. It exaggerates, satirises. David Lohrey adopts a kind of precious tone throughout, punctuated by moments of bluntness and, sometimes, absurdity. No more so than in the last line, “The test is a scrotum that looks like a pouch for rare coins”.

There’s a kind of wildness to the language, at times. And language itself is presented as a kind of weapon, but a necessary weapon rendered less effective by civility. I suppose you could say it’s a poem about freedom, and here, freedom is associated with old age. We tend to laugh at an outrageous comment from an older person more readily than we would such a comment from a young person. Thus, “If you are under 40, you may not know / what it feels like to be free”. In the age of the internet, this is a particularly topical theme. With such a permanent record and potential influence, we’re perhaps more accountable than ever before. And that’s hardly a bad thing.

The approach that Lohrey takes here is worth noting. This is one of those long, rolling poems that come at the reader in relentless tides, with similar ideas repeated in different ways to give a wide picture. Most of all, I think it’s a poem concerned with the need to speak up, to not be afraid to stand up for your beliefs despite how you feel others might react. That may or may not be a political act. A person’s views may or may not be correct. But, just like the extreme civility that’s held up to ridicule in this poem, we all need to be ready to hear others contradict us, to laugh at us or, if they deem it necessary, to ridicule us. At the end of the day, opinions are just opinions – each one is a mere fraction of our personality. We shouldn’t let them define us or our relationships with each other.

Honestly
We are shutting down.
I can feel it.
If you don’t, it may be your age.
If you are under 40, you may not know
what it feels like to be free.

The young are being trained how to think and what to say –
how to speak, I should say, how to avoid hurting feelings,
I might add, especially their own.
This, too, is how my grandmother’s generation was taught.

This art of avoidance, this training in artificial kindness,
was all the rage in 19th century America, along with petticoats.
Girls today demand the manners if not the underpants.
It’s all too familiar to the Modernists who dropped it.
The puritans want a hold on the arts.
Ladies were dainty – ask Gertrude Stein –
and wanted their men dainty, too, like little Lord Fauntleroy,
a gentle soul in curls and a shiny frock.

Now it’s back.
You mustn’t say the wrong things.
You mustn’t hurt mommy’s feelings.
Girls are delicate and break easily.
One mustn’t be seen without a chaperone.
One must speak in a whisper, one must
avoid making a faux pas. One must bathe in rose water,
and remember to sip one’s green tea in silence.

We’re reverting to this atmosphere.
Anguish is hidden behind gentility.
One keeps one’s opinions to oneself.
You’re better off batting your eyelids and smiling brightly.
One carries a sugar-coated dagger in one’s kimono.

There’ll be no more letting one’s hair down.
No more telling people off.
No more sharing, no more feedback;
it’s just input from here on in –
input perfumed like a hair salon
or bordello in San Francisco in 1910,
the full-treatment insisted upon by silent film stars,
the sort of shit Liberace demanded.

The truth will look and sound like a barking Chihuahua
waiting for its master at the county fair.
A tiny mutt decorated in a giant ribbon,
not a guard dog but a companion to someone
with blue hair and a brand new Cadillac. In short,
the little old lady from Pasadena holds the line.

Along with cosmopolitanism comes this level of sophistication.
Everyone lies. People don’t smoke but swallow ashtrays.
People don’t have butts but covet their neighbor’s derriere.
The key is to remove one’s enemy’s tongue without drawing blood.
It’s a silent coup. Men who defecate in the garden are called animals,
while those with private chefs are treasured human beings.
The test is a scrotum that looks like a pouch for rare coins.

About David
I was born on the Hudson River just north of NYC but grew up in Memphis. I went out to California and graduated from U.C., Berkeley. After graduation, I began my teaching career in LA, but eventually wound up in Osaka, Japan where I taught for a while and got married. From there I went to Saudi Arabia and to China. I am now teaching English to engineering students in Tokyo. I reviewed books for The Los Angeles Times and The Orange County Register for many years, joined the Dramatists Guild, and served as a judge for the Los Angeles Ovation Awards. My plays have appeared around the country and in Canada; more recently, in Lithuania and Croatia, in translation.

I have always had my favorite poets, such as Dylan Thomas, D.H. Lawrence, Stevie Smith, but my real inspiration has been playwrights, such as O’Neil, Miller, Mamet and Pinter. There are so many. These days I read Frederick Seidel and the Australian Les Murray. I’ve written so many grad school papers, film, theatre, and book reviews…what I love about writing poetry is that I am able to tap into deeper sources of inspiration, really the irrational. Things just pop up, often poems just appear wholly written; I just take dictation and must restrain myself, stop thinking, and let it flow out virtually unedited.

My poetry can be found in Softblow, The Blue Mountain Review, Otoliths, Cecile’s Writers and Quarterday, In addition, recent poems have been accepted as part of anthologies published by the University of Alabama (Dewpoint), Illinois State University (Obsidian) and Michigan State University (The Offbeat). I recently joined the Sudden Denouement Literary Collective in Houston.

I am currently writing a memoir of my years living on the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf.

Interview
How have the internet and social media affected so-called political correctness?

The media elite seems to see itself as instruments of some kind of moral authority who will decide what is acceptable. It is secular puritanism which promotes a kind of primness. Chiefly they have actual ownership and total control.

Are all social trends cyclical, do you think, or do only some things return for a particular reason? If so, for what reasons can you think?

I am not sure they are cyclical. I see a devolution, a spiraling down without an anticipated return.

There was progress in the 20th c toward liberation, but now restraints are tightening, generated by self-righteous people.. The socio-economic gap is spoken of, but the gap between the educated and the ignorant is widening, too.

Is there a vital need for brutal honesty when writing poetry? Is the same also true in terms of receiving feedback on one’s writing?

Not so sure here. I believe in restraint. Honesty can be too brutal, feedback can be well-intended but I think things have to come from inside. Feedback often includes suggestions and I seldom want suggestions. Reactions, sure, but ‘helpful’ editing suggestions I find out of line.

There’s a sense of language being controlled in this poem. What are the dangers for society of controlling language too much?

I’m 61 and lived through the wonderful breakdown of restraint in the arts. Nudity and profanity in the arts were thrilling in a way. I am old enough to remember “damn” being a problem, not to mention all the other glorious curse words. It is about control and power. “You shouldn’t say that” is so commonly repeated along with the demand for apology. Victorian sensibilities are exploited to gain control of discourse. It is destructive to art, that’s for sure. In America, teachers need permission to show films. A masterpiece like “Women in Love” would not be permitted in a senior lit seminar. I taught in China recently and asked if I needed permission to show a film. The reply was, “We hired you to give permission. You’re the teacher.” But in the US, teachers are treated like children and are made to worry about “getting into trouble.”

Why do you write?

For me it is all journal-writing, really. Diary-keeping. It helps me to move the words from my head to paper. Really to get rid of them, to purge. Relieve. The satisfaction comes in releasing the words, the images, the burden, really, and feeling fresh. I love especially to “share” a story. It is like cleaning out the garage. Wonderful.

If you had one piece of advice for a writer, what would it be?

Master a foreign language. Live outside the country.

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#33 "After the Drought" by Helen Harrison

1/5/2017

Introduction
What attracted me to this poem was its interesting, twisty rhythm. Its odd grammar is a bit of a tongue-twister, and invites the reader to really concentrate on what’s being said. And this rhythm is offset by the poem’s very simple theme. Basically, this poem boils down to the idea that creativity has the power to console us emotionally, just as food sustains us physically.

It’s awash with natural imagery, and I think anyone can relate to the solitary heron. We have all had moments in our lives when we felt alone, even if just for a brief period. Company is often the best medicine, but poetry, fiction, music and anything else creative, for that matter, are another kind of company. In a sense, the artist speaks to him/herself while also, presumably, having a reader/viewer in mind.

Helen Harrison’s poem ends with a command to the reader, or maybe it’s a plea. That’s fair enough coming from someone who has experienced the wonders of creativity. It might even encourage someone to take up writing for the first time. And why not. But, for some readers, art could be substituted for something else. Physical activity, say. Or just experiencing nature. In a world of technology and constant communication, we all need to find peace somehow.

After the Drought
The climate that dampens a human heart
Is the one where the heron thrives, feeding
Nourishment they need; frogs, insects and seeds.
Though seasons that flow soon suffer drought
As humans suffer pain and doubt, until all
That’s left to soothe a heart is art.

To tap-in to a creative zone, find
Calm through all climates; like a heron's
Individual path of flight. Put your human
Mind to use; make no excuse for unnecessary
Hardship; find your gift then feed your art
To find some peace within your heart.

About Helen
I began writing poetry before I had even read any, which is not something I’d recommend, but it worked for me. My first collection was published by Lapwing during 2015. https://sites.google.com/a/lapwingpublications.com/lapwing-store/helen-harrison

I’m not sure if it would have happened without the influence of reading novels, particularly by Irish authors like John McGahern, Niall Williams, Sabastian Barry and Joseph O’Connor, to name but a few. I now thrive on poetry from the likes of W.S Merwin, Raymond Carver, Mary Oliver, Naomi Shihab Nye, William Stafford, Patrick Kavanagh, Ted Hughes, Carolyn Forche and, more recently, W.B. Yeats. There are many more I could mention. I’m also very excited by the writing from young females here in Ireland. I try to share their poetry often online to renew interest in the craft. Often a first collection of poetry can be the best.

Many are listed here: https://poethead.wordpress.com/c-murray-the-poethead-site/ edited by Chris Murray. I’m also a fan of many of the mature writers also featured here, and never fail to share something if it’s good. I believe in fairness.

As to my own writing I tend to pick up paper when I get a line into my head. I write, rewrite and eventually type, retype, print, write over what I’ve printed, retype and a final print. All I need to carry when I travel somewhere is a small notebook and pen. I don’t even get bored on long bus journeys – in fact I often thrive on them. My main holiday last year consisted of a seven-day open-road Bus Eireann coach ticket which I used to travel Co. Kerry and the Beara peninsular in West Cork. I adore meeting characters who have often inspired my poems.

I have also participated in open mics. It was from there that I got invited to be guest reader at venues.

My independent nature stems from my upbringing on the Wirral, England (born to Irish parents) where I was allowed the freedom others were denied. I would often go trekking or cycling on my own. I was adventurous and brave. It was only my physique (spotty and lanky) and being a late developer as a teenager that knocked my confidence. I found I had little in common with other girls, especially in school, and was often bored. I day-dreamed the time
away and wished I’d been writing then.

One of my favourite memories was summers spent among the hills of Castleblayney with my brothers and sisters on granny’s farm. My granddad liked poetry and apparently recited the poems he had learnt at school as he worked the farm during his adult life.

I returned to live here in Ireland when I was in my twenties, married a fellow from the City of Liverpool and we have a grown-up daughter with an Irish accent living here in Ireland. So finally back to our roots.....

Samples of my poetry can be found here: http://poetry4on.blogspot.ie/

Interview
You refer to “the climate that dampens a human heart”. How does the weather affect your writing? And do you, like many writers, find that you’re more productive when it’s lashing rain outside?

The same way as it affects people's moods. I like a sunny bench outside the house best of all.

Artistic creation as a therapeutic process is an established idea, though many artists can be wary of embracing the idea. Does writing function as a therapy for you in any way?

Definitely. If I'm stressed about something I try rhyming patterns (terza rima a favourite) as writing in form focuses the mind. Other times poetry like happiness is as natural and easy as breathing.

Nature features strongly here. Is it in our nature to be creative, or is art literally an “artificial” or unnatural preoccupation?

The oldest musical instrument we have is a bone flute (40,000 years old) exquisitely crafted and would have been a month in the making. People have had the same brain as us for hundreds of thousands of years only the culture is different.

There’s a nice rhythm in this poem, and no shortage of assonance or internal rhyme (eg. “feeding”, “need”, “seeds”, “season” and “find”, “climates”, “flight”, “mind”). I think these are somewhat neglected elements in a lot of modern poetry. Would you agree or disagree, and what do you think such sound techniques can bring to poetry?

It's important to learn about different techniques, and listening to and reading poetry to pick up on the rhythm. Also just to sit down with a pen and paper and let free your mind.

Why do you write?

To make a sense of something. I enjoy weaving words and the use of metaphor.

If you had one piece of advice for a writer, what would it be?

Everyone's life has its own rhythm, some slow, some fast; follow your own rhythm and enjoy it.

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#32 "Glassblower" by David Butler

1/4/2017

Introduction
Poetry works well with detail. It has the ability to sharpen the focus on minute things, without the restless momentum of a novel or a song, which impels the reader forward. Poetry is more patient with us. It allows us to wait.

David Butler’s poem “Glassblower” is a perfect example. It’s a process poem which bathes itself in a rich pool of detail. And yet, it serves as a character sketch by proxy. Anyone who takes such care with his/her work, exercising judgement and skill to create something, can surely be considered an artist of sorts. Butler’s own art is breathed into shape via elegant imagery. Its metaphors are drawn from the natural world, sending our imagination to a beehive, a red sun and a sense of the mathematical (geometry). It creates a sense of awe, what the Romantic poets would call “the sublime”.

Of course, poetry can do much more than this. Although a recent article in the Irish Times erected arbitrary borders around it (read it here), poetry also has other functions. It can be political, personal, confessional. It can satirise, glorify or lament. Basically, poetry can be anything, restricted only by the poet’s own skill and imagination. David Butler’s poem shows us that it can also simply watch and describe quiet moments.

Glassblower
It is as though an incandescent swarm
has clustered, on a spindle of his breath,
to fabricate a hive
in the hot globe of amber.
The air is given hands,
cupping the molten bubble thrown out
by his steady lung, crafting
the dull red sun until it sets,
like a premonition of Winter,
into the fragile geometry of glass.

About David
I've been writing poetry that I'm no longer embarrassed by since 2000, when Poetry Ireland Review published 'Swallows', which went on to win the Ted McNulty Award that year. Several other poems landed prizes over the next couple of years: 'Glassblower' won the LUAS/Tallaght Prize and 'Chartes Cathedral' the lucrative Feile Filiochta. It's a slow craft.

A decade passed before my inaugural collection, Via Crucis, was published by the now defunct Doghouse Press in 2011, another six before my second collection, All the Barbaric Glass, came out this March, courtesy of Doire Press (http://doirepress.com/writers/a_f/david_butler/). Again it includes some prizewinners: 'Solstice' won the Baileborough 2016, 'Depredation' the Ballyroan Library Award and 'Raithin an Chloig, Bray' the 2014 Phizzfest. I've also been immensely lucky to land a Per Cent Literary Arts Commission to produce a poetry sequence based around the Blackrock coastline, Dublin, a work in progress.

Outside of poetry I've had three novels published, the most recent of which, City of Dis (New Island) was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. A collection of stories, No Greater Love, was published in London by Ward Wood in 2013. But writing can be a solitary pursuit. To stay sane I've been acting, directing and (attempting to) write for theatre since 2010. Last year, my one-act Blue Love won a Cork Arts Theatre Writers Award, took 5 awards at the Bray One Act festival and was a winner of the British Theatre Challenge. RTE, meanwhile, are about to record my radio play Jealousy for their Drama on One spot. And a film group, NoWiFi, have just finished filming a short I wrote.

Interview
Does poetry have any special ability or importance in terms of simply describing, rather than commenting on or analysing, things?

Does poetry, or any art for that matter, ever simply describe? Poetry, I would say, has much in common with painting during the heroic era of early modernism, the era in which the materiality of the medium and partiality of the painter were brought to the fore. Language, the medium in which the poet paints or sculpts, is never neutral. As much as it denotes, it connotes. It is acoustically alive. It subsists in an echo-chamber of quotation and etymology. That’s why, as Frost famously put it, poetry is that quality which is lost in translation. In Glassblower, the various meanings of the verb ‘to set’ which concludes the piece are unavailable in any other language that I’m aware of. Again, the coherence of a poem depends on sound in the way a painting’s depends on colour. Alliteration and assonance are not, or are not merely, mimetic. Thus the ‘u’ sound running through cupping, bubble, lung, dull, sun has less to do with onomatopoeia than with what might be called the internal economy of the image. It’s a technique very much to the fore in the work of Sylvia Plath.

Your poem is very much one of a process. It’s a process that involves several steps. Are step-by-step processes important in poetry?

Absolutely! Poetry is a craft. And a slow craft. Ginsberg’s injunction ‘first thought, best thought’ has given license to a lot of sloppy posturing calling itself poetry. This is not to downplay the importance of spontaneity or the aleatory – what’s sometimes referred to as the ‘happy accident’. Found poems are as valid in their own right as the objet trouvé – in fact, that’s what Joyce intended by his term 'epiphanies'. That said, I often think of poetry as a distillation of language – a slow and repeated process of boiling and condensation until such time as the purity acquires a certain ‘proof’. Conversely, I’d be suspicious of a poem that doesn’t require slow and repeated reading.

I sense a touch of Heaney here, maybe because of his poem “The Forge”, which describes the work of a blacksmith (http://cropcirclers.blogspot.ie/2006/03/forge-by-seamus-heaney-all-i-know-is.html). Would you say there’s an influence here and/or on your work in general? What do you think poets can learn from him?

As an adolescent I read much Heaney. He was one of the Fab Four to whom I constantly returned, along with Hughes, Plath and Larkin. Particularly the Heaney of North, which remains for me one of the key texts in later 20th century Irish writing. Heaney has a fantastic ear, together with a lively interest in etymology. There is an obvious relish of unusual or local vocabulary. And his imagery has the clarity of Dutch genre painting that calls to mind Robert Lowell’s lines: ‘Pray for the grace of accuracy / Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination / stealing like the tide across a map.’ Later, although my German remains rudimentary, I found the same qualities in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Neue Gedichte. I think, if you trust in the image, in the care given to its representation, the meaning will look after itself.

Specialist skills – is the poet’s skill as specialist as that of a glassblower, or is it a lot more accessible to anyone willing to put in the time and effort?

Poetry is far more various than glassblowing. There are as many types of poetry as there are poets. Not all are to my taste, nor should they be. At the heart of the question I detect the old chestnut as to whether poetry, or any creative writing, can be taught. Appreciation can be taught, and appreciation is central to creativity. So, too, technique. Observation is critical. Also, patience. Talent, on the other hand, is largely innate. On the question of accessibility, poetry is often seen as elitist. Some of it is. The unholy marriage of poets living through academia and small university presses is nefarious in the extreme. On the other hand, the sung poetry of artists such as Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits has reached into millions of bedrooms…

Why do you write?

Without meaning to sound trite, because I have to. I do have other creative passions. I love painting and acting. I love cooking (honest!). I used to love lecturing, and still love tutoring. Where these remain pastimes, writing is a compulsion. When a week or more goes by without writing I feel nagging guilt, as though it’s a duty I’m scanting. That I’ve been lucky enough to have had much of my work published is one hell of a gift.

If you had one piece of advice for a writer, what would it be?

Read. Then read more. Reread. Read both widely and deeply. Read critically. Read out loud. Above all, reread your own work. Become (difficult, this!) an objective reader of your own work. Become, if at all possible, the most critical reader of your own work. Oh, and persevere. No glassblower ever produced a piece of glass by giving up!

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#31 "Black Pudding" by Eileen P Keane

1/3/2017

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Introduction
The best writing is often very evocative. It often plucks at our senses, and, in poetry, the senses of sight and sound are most often called upon. In Eileen P Keane’s poem “Black Pudding”, the senses of smell and texture (or touch) take centre-stage. And that’s why, after reading it, I felt like I’d just had a serious feed.

That’s not to say that this poem isn’t rich in visual imagery. The great expanse of cooled blood is compared to a “molten moon” and “blushed clay”, for example. It’s this immersion in all of the senses that brings the reader into the poem’s world. One of the main things that any work of art should do, it could be said, is to transport the reader/viewer into an alternative world. It may be a realistic world or an unrealistic one, a historical one or some other type, but it takes a skilled writer to execute it, in any case.

Every family is its own world, too. And this is a poem of family and tradition. It’s a poem of secrets and the “delighted fingers” of a curious child. The pudding could be viewed as a metaphor. Maybe a metaphor for savagery, like a complement to those “sibling wars”. Or maybe, with its dark depths and its assault on the senses, it’s a metaphor for love, sustaining a family physically and emotionally. Either way, it sounds tasty.

Black Pudding
The cooled blood set and sat in the dark
until the children carried it to the kitchen.
There under the bare bulb it split open scarlet
rills across the surface of its molten moon.

Clouds of waxy belly fat, onion and thyme
were folded in as mother and brood oozed
the gooey mess through delighted fingers.
The scoured out belly, ragged edge folded

neatly back, lay desolate until little fists
reached into its chilly hollow and deposited
their bloodied gift. Then a rubbery-lipped
seam was sewn across its girth. Left to boil,

it seeped into their slumber, it set to a blushed
clay that cooled into moon-filled dawn.
They ate thick slices, fried with soda bread,
drank milky tea. Then with shins bruised

gentian-blue in sibling wars they shouldered
heavy bags along the old road to school,
where they knew better already, than to breathe
a word of this, their pagan practice.

About Eileen
I now live in north Connemara near my homeplace. I returned here four years ago after being away for a long time. I have travelled widely and lived in many countries in Europe and South America. In addition to writing prose and poetry I am a singer/songwriter. I have aspirations to garden and have a weekly book show on Connemara FM.

Publications: Fish Anthology, Skylight 47, Galway Review. I have performed all over, including Electric Picnic. My music has been played on RTE Radio and television. I will be a featured reader at the Cuirt/Over the Edge showcase this April.

Interview
Do you think there are any similarities between cooking and writing poetry (and particularly in relation to accessing “bloodied gifts” when writing)?

Cooking is much easier than writing unless of course you are on Master Chef. If you want to make good black pudding follow your mother’s recipe and you will probably fare O.K. Write a poem about making Black Pudding there is no recipe you have to make it up and usually it goes wrong and you have to start again and again and even then it takes a lot of time rewriting, trimming. Putting stuff in and taking stuff out. Bloodied gifts are just that bloodied with effort. However its enjoyable effort mostly, whiles away many the rainy day.

Is poetry as an art form, compared to, say, fiction or painting, particularly useful for exploring/describing intricate processes? If so, why?

I’m not great at painting and fiction is not my thing. I write creative non-fiction memoir and poetry so really I can only talk about those. Each form feeds the other poetry teaches precision and economy, long form prose allows you to tunnel in a long way maybe you find diamonds maybe you don’t, maybe you are not looking for diamonds only wishing to see what it’s like in the tunnel . Poetry is about polishing the stone, finding what’s hidden and making it shine. Of course none of this is true!

Considering the natural flow of the poem, it’s interesting that you have adopted a pretty rigid structure, in terms of all five verses containing four lines. Could you tell us about the importance of structure here and in poetry in general? Any particular thoughts on choosing a consistent number of lines per verse, as opposed to a varying number?

Structure is something that presents itself. The structure of this piece has remained consistent from the very start and in the writing it was central in providing containment. The structure holds the pudding if you like! I often use four line stanzas but again it seems the subject matter chooses. Julian Barnes the novelist says something to the effect that the right structure for his ideas is essential. He gets an idea and then waits for the right structure to make itself known. Often if a piece is not working for me I try a different structure. Sometimes a poem works better as a short story and vice versa. I’ve admired poets that use the totality of the page, who experiment with how the poem looks on the page using indent, tabs etc. I’ve always shied away from that until recently writing about a storm the poem just took off and spread itself across the page. What was enjoyable and interesting was that the subject matter dictated the form, led the way.

The black abyss of the pudding is echoed by the children’s silence at the end. What value, or indeed what failings, do you think silence leads to in our lives?

Silence is very important to me. At least the absence of electronic noise, music, voices. Silence is full, when you just let go into it it’s enormously rich. For me the trick is knowing when I have had enough and that is usually very close to the moment when I’m thinking this is bliss! I live in the mountains and spend time in the city every so often. I’m glad usually to get back and after a couple of days you really settle into the quiet and the work changes. It goes deeper. Balance is the trick for me. We all have very different needs when it comes to solitude and silence.

Why do you write?

Because I need to. I go a bit daft if I’m not writing. I start writing in my head and then if I can’t get to the page I get angsty. Like a lot of writers I write to hear myself and to mythologise my life. Once a piece is finished or as finished as you can make it, it’s no longer yours. When it gets published, broadcast, read by others it becomes something else, it belongs to the reader and becomes part of their imagination. I also write because having tried almost everything else it has been my one consistent companion. I wrote for sanity, to exercise the need for years, before I ever considered writing professionally. I’m also a singer and performed quite a bit and wrote songs brought out an EP got played on the radio did the Electric Picnic but I always struggled with it in away I don’t with writing. It took me a long time to let go and stop struggling and just do what feels comfortable.

If you had one piece of advice for a writer, what would it be?

Write! Then write some more! The best bit of advice I’ve ever been given was from the novelist Greg Baxter he said ‘writing is hard won.’ I really understand this and it helps me to persevere through the hours and hours days weeks months and years it takes to get anywhere. There are a lot of people writing now, more than ever before, if you really want it , (the writers life I mean not fame and fortune but being paid now and again would be nice!) then it means making sacrifices being able to resource yourself in non-monetary ways. Find ways to keep the faith in yourself and your work. It’s not easy.

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#30 "The Artist Paints the Immaculate Conception" by Michele Vassal

1/2/2017

Introduction
Sometimes, the choices an artist makes – whether a painter, poet, musician or any other kind – are defined by what he/she leaves out, rather than what actually appears in the work. I guess that makes sense in relation to leaving out clichés, but it’s not necessarily an obvious point apart from that. Michele Vassal digs into the idea of negative space in her poem “The Artist Paints the Immaculate Conception”.

There’s also a kind of negative space as the poem progresses, with the mention of “yours” and “this man” – the reader is left to wonder. At first, I thought “yours” referred to a lover, but the poem later seemed to be addressed to a son. Maybe it was that first assumption of a lover that led me to think “this man” might not refer to the absence of Jesus (and hence religion), but rather to the absence of an actual father.

I suppose you could say that everyone uses absence to define themselves, to some degree. We imagine the people we have not become, as well as the people we have. We imagine what might have been, as if we could’ve let the other side of our brain decide our choices for us. And maybe it’s this, the “what ifs” of speculation we can all relate to, that draw us to the fantasy world that art offers.

The Artist Paints the Immaculate Conception
Drawing with the right side of the brain
teaches us to trace the empty space
around the object one wants to capture
its contours revealed by what is not.
When I painted The Annunciation in Bewley's
(the background of Harry Clarke stained glass
and the velvet seats' crimson lustre
made it very pre-Raphaelite)
I remembered little besides his white shoes
because I had thought them in bad taste,
and his eyes, because they were like yours.
But now that I know how to draw negative space
the invisible angle of his wrist
against your shoulder, the fictive space
between you and him nearly non-existent
I gouge our existence out of the void:

And I wonder if it could be, my son,
that this man's absence has defined us.

About Michele
I am from the Ubaye Valley in the French Alps, a place of extraordinary beauty, half-way between Provence and Piedmont. I was blessed to be born to a completely dysfunctional family and thus to be reared, episodically, by my eccentric grand-aunt and her scholarly husband. Early on, my uncle introduced me to the writings of Saint Exupéry, Colette, Verlaine, Rimbaud and Baudelaire. Later, I discovered Prévert, Apollinaire and Boris Vian.

Aged seventeen and a half (halves mattered then!) I came to Ireland and decided to stay, acquiring two children in the process. Somewhere along the way I started reading in English, choosing Irish writers such as Edna O’Brien, Flann O’Brien and Michael Hartnett to initiate me. I had never stopped scribbling “en français” but discovering Irish writers/poets fuelled a new passion in me and I eventually took up the pen, in English. In 1999, I won the Prize for a First Collection at Listowel Writers Week and since then my poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, both here and abroad. I have two collections both published by Salmon – Sandgames (2000) and A Taste for Hemlock (2011).

My poetry has also been adapted to music, most notably by legendary Skid Row guitarist Jimi Slevin and acclaimed singer/songwriter, my dear friend, the late Martin Egan.

I live near Bantry, with my husband, the piper/harper Brendan Ring. We are currently collaborating together on some new recordings.

Interview
In comparison to fiction and theatre, both poetry and art are ideal for highlighting details – would you agree or disagree? And why?

I totally agree and it is part of the attraction for me, to both Art and Poetry. A painting or a sculpture is very close to a poem, they are both limited spatially and those physical constrictions allow for a greater exploration of the subject matter. The artist/poet zooms in, enlarges a detail and paints it, all senses focused. It’s a wonderful process.

Mind you, on reflection, a play or a work of fiction can also allow this. Lorca said, El teatro es poesía que se sale del libro para hacerse humana, meaning, “Theatre is poetry which comes out of the book, to become human”. I have realised as I was writing this, that all forms of Art can be used to highlight details.

How significant do you think the process of leaving things out is when creating a work of art or creativity, whether it be a poem, a painting or something else?

Ah, the negative space! I first came across this concept in life drawing class, it was a complete revelation. To draw what is not there and by doing so creating what is there! It completely altered my vision of things. To me, what is left out – the empty space – the absence are essential and defining.

Poetry and Art, are, or at least should be, conversations, not monologues. The un-said, like the un-shown, is a way of letting the other in. In painting it can be used as a prop to lead the eye, in poetry, it can be a punctuation, a breath. Sometimes it is the very matrix of the piece.

Leaving things out creates a space, a void, a mystery. Sometimes it serves to highlight what is present. Space in life, is the opposite of imprisonment, it is freedom.

If empty was a colour, it would be white, which when juxtaposed to other colours, emphasizes them, or when added to them (white to red for example), radically transforms their very essence.

If you could compare your poetry (and that of any other poets you’d care to mention) to a certain artistic style, what style would it be?

I am not sure that I have a style as such. The constant element in many of my poems would seem to be colour and I have been told that I write in a way which is quite painterly. I guess that’s the result of a background in painting and a passion for colour.

I love Garcia Lorca’s work, his use of metaphors and symbolism, not to mention the sensuality of his writing, he is my biggest influence. I also admire Prévert’s well sculpted pieces - minimalist with a social conscience. I tend to write with a scalpel these days and spend more time editing than writing.

Currently I am reading a lot of wonderfully translated Turkish poetry (translator Neil Patrick Doherty ) and it is feeding my soul.

The ending of your poem strikes me as particularly ambiguous. Are such parting sentiments (ie. ambiguous or unclear ones) particularly appropriate to poetry? Can neat, clear endings work just as well?

Because English isn’t my mother tongue, I tend to try not to have opinions on what is appropriate or not, in poetry. To paraphrase Aristotle, the more I write, the more I read and the more I realise that I know very little. My approach is very instinctive. Sometimes I like a piece just because of the sounds that course it. Don’t forget what I hear in my head is not necessarily what the poet meant for me to hear. I have my own little set of poetic problems such as a confused accentuation, which can annihilate proper rhythm and meters.
But I digress. Neat, clear endings? Of course they work really well, especially in neat and clear situations – which this wasn’t J. This poem was one of the first I wrote in English, it was a letter of sorts. I meant it to be ambiguous.

Why do you write?

It has been a long love story. When I was a very young child, I wrote stories and made them into little books which I bound together with a red stitch. There was always magic in the act of writing – the smell of the purple ink, the whole ritual of changing nibs but even more powerful magic was found in words. I used to collect words. Still do, actually.

I write also because I have something to say, a story to tell, a time to remember. Sometimes I simply write because it helps.

If you had one piece of advice for a writer, what would it be?

My mum’s advice to whatever life threw was “Sit down and have a glass of wine”. It’s sound advice in most circumstances. But seriously though – edit it again and again and again, let it rest and edit it some more, would be my advice.

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#29 "Lost" by Matthew Rice

1/1/2017

Introduction
Some poems come from what can only be described as idle observation. This feels like one of those poems. You can imagine the poet sitting there with a pint, noticing a man in the corner. After a while, intrigued, the poet starts scribbling a few lines on a beermat. There’s little planning, just a process of recording thoughts on paper. With later drafts, these thoughts are refined. Of course, you can never make absolute assumptions about how a poem found its way onto the page, so it’s worth checking out Matthew’s answers to the questions at the end of this post.

The first verse has a hint of Heaney, especially in that phrase “elbow-snug”. However, the poem steers clear of Heaney pastiche whilst offering moments worthy of his skill in well-chosen verbs/phrases such as “steeped in age” and “the answer flamed in his glass”.

Of course, at the centre of this poem is the idea that this apparently silent man is preoccupied with words, bringing the pencil to the page in order to complete his crossword. He himself is an abandoned boat, and words, whether on paper or uttered from mouths, keep him connected to the world.

Lost
He'd catch my eye every now and again,
across the bar, tucked against the wall,
elbow-snug, hands across themselves

at rest, moving only to scribble on a crossword
when the answer flamed in his glass,
then ritually leave the pencil and grip the pint

to be chased down with a whiskey. You'd see him
day or night, steeped in age, Sunday afternoons
with the air of widower, silhouetted in front of the window

where the old abandoned boats
in the bay pulled and tugged gently
against what kept them from being lost.

About Matthew
I was born in Belfast in 1980. I now live and work in Carrickfergus, County Antrim. I am currently studying for my BA Honours in English Language and Literature. I have published poems in magazines and journals on both sides of the Atlantic, including The Asheville Poetry Review and The Honest Ulsterman. I was one of six new poets showcased in a special reading to mark Poetry Day Ireland, organised by Poetry NI and Poetry Ireland. My work was chosen for the 2016 Community Arts Partnership anthology, Connections, funded by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland (http://comartspartner.org/news/community-arts-partnership-literature-and-verbal-arts-poetry-in-motion-community-connections/). I was long-listed for the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing 2016. I am currently finalising my first collection of poems entitled Door Left Open.

In terms of influences, there are a lot of poets that I admire greatly, but I guess a few of the biggest ones would be the likes of Ted Hughes, R.S. Thomas; the war poets such as Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and the WWII poet, Keith Douglas; the Americans are also hard to beat, Raymond Carver, Charles Bukowski, Heather McHugh and John Berryman among my favourites. The Eastern Europeans are another clutch of geniuses, Joseph Brodsky, Czeslaw Milosz, Anna Akhmatova and Miroslav Holub, just four that I love. In terms of contemporary poets, so to speak, Paul Durcan, Michael Longley, Don Paterson, Harry Smart and Ian Duhig are five I greatly admire. I'm lucky enough to know the latter two personally, and nicer, funnier men you will not meet. There are so many other Irish poets I could name, but it would take all day to list them. Here in Belfast I very much respect the work of younger poets currently on the scene, across the academic divide, of which Stephen Sexton and Colin Dardis are just two names that spring to mind amidst a cityscape that includes the likes of Geraldine O'Kane, Jan Carson, Lynda Tavakoli and Stephanie Conn, all of which constitute but a drop in a rich poetic ocean. Seamus Heaney, though, is a touchstone for me; to paraphrase the singer Seasick Steve in his song 'The Dark': He was there at the beginning, he'll be there at the end. I also have to pay tribute to my father, Adrian Rice, without whom I would not be writing poetry. I may be biased, but what a great poet. I read his books like a fan.

Interview
Although it could be said that every writer writes from observation, this feels very specifically like a poem of observation, where the speaker is observing someone/something from a distance. It could also be thought of as a poem of speculation. What roles do you think observation and speculation have in writing poetry?

You are right in your assumption, it is indeed a poem of observation; and with that comes speculation, I guess, especially if you do not know the background to the person or thing that you are observing. In poetry I think observation and speculation are of utmost importance. As a writer it is part of your job to observe and speculate. A biographer might have less scope to employ the latter, but as poets we are not bound by convention. Look at Paul Muldoon's wonderful poem, 'Why Brownlee Left'; that is a perfect example of observation and speculation. The poem originated from a photo of two horses standing in a field that was half ploughed, unattended, their owner nowhere to be seen, and as Muldoon himself states, he tried to construct a narrative for what may have happened to the man, the 'Brownlee' of the title. The observation quickly turns to speculation as the horses end up 'gazing into the future.' A beautiful and mysterious image, and one that underlines the importance of the two ideas in poetry. In a sense 'Lost' is bookended by the two, if you like.

I like the idea of “the air of a widower”, and the fact that you don’t elaborate on it in the poem, but could you elaborate on it here now? What do you actually see and smell when you sense the air of a widower?

The man in the poem is an elderly man who is drinking by himself in his local pub. I suppose his wife could be at home, but I just felt that the sense of him spending hours in his local on a Sunday as an elderly man gave him the 'air of widower'; I had the sense of him using the pub as a distraction for grief, an old grief, ok, but nonetheless a grief he carried with him. I suppose as the author of the poem I imagined myself as an elderly widower and transposed how I thought I might deal with the death of a long-term companion into the poem – speculation again! The musty, dry alcohol smell of a man no longer freshened and buoyed by a woman's touch at home, and lesser for it, perhaps even a little lost... Or it could be he has entirely different reasons for his melancholic routine, but it just seemed to pour out of him, that image.

Men and silence. I could leave the question at that. But I won’t. The subject of the poem seems like the silent type, and you’ve obviously deemed him worthy of interest in writing the poem. What do you think attracts people/artists to the idea of the silent man?

I love silence, I must say. When I train in my local gym I am always happier when the place is almost empty and the music is not playing. I can withdraw into myself and my subconscious, I can reach a higher level of focus, or I can get lost in a poetic image and find that I come out of the gym with a poem. I gravitate to quiet places, where only natural sounds add to the tranquillity. That's not to say I don't enjoy listening to music and chatting etc, but I do feel very strongly that silence has a very important part to play in keeping the creative mind and soul in balance. So with that being said, I think the artist is attracted to the idea of the silent man, or woman, because they represent a kind of peace that is required in order to create art. An artist IS a silent man, or woman, when they are absorbed in their work, so I guess the image of that just offers up contemplative material.

Can you tell us about how you came to write this poem? Did you come across the man many times, then suddenly realise one day that you’d write about him? Or did you know the first time you met him? And how long was the idea gestating before you began writing the poem?

I first saw the man across the bar when I was about fifteen years old in a pub on the Islandmagee Peninsula in North East Antrim, where I grew up. The pub no longer stands. I would see him over the next few years periodically as I snuck in to watch the football on Sundays or Saturday afternoons. There he would be, in the same spot, with the pint and the whiskey and the paper, doing the crossword. Sometimes he'd do crosswords on old newspapers that had been left behind by other punters. I never actually met him, I never knew his name. It seemed only the bar staff knew his name. I just noticed him from across the bar each time I went up to order. He had the classic old-man-at-the-bar-in-a-Spielberg-film look. So the idea for the poem seeded itself in my teenage mind and gestated for 19 years or so before it got written. But the poem could be as much about myself as the man at the centre of it.

Why do you write?

Paul Muldoon was asked the same question once and replied, 'It's how I make sense of the world, to myself.' That would be hard to disagree with. The world is such a complex place that sometimes a complex method is required to simplify it, in a soulful manner at least. It does my soul good to read and write. That's not to imply that I think poetry is therapy, but it certainly can be therapeutic. I recently showed a prose piece I wrote to the poet Harry Smart, and when he had finished reading it he said, 'This one just lets loose the despair, which is fair enough, one of poetry's jobs.' I agree.

If you had one piece of advice for a writer, what would it be?

I would tend to side with Colin Dardis when he advised: 'Read.' I would wholeheartedly agree, however I would add: 'Read the right stuff.' If you immerse yourself in reading great work, it lessens your chances of writing bad work yourself. As well as that, I would advise anyone looking to become a writer to develop a strong backbone and always persevere, no matter how many knockbacks you may take. Endure the rough with the smooth, and hopefully the work you produce will in turn endure.

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#28 "Salthill Ferris Wheel" by Ruth Quinlan

1/12/2016

4 Comments

Introduction
It was the tone of this poem that drew me in. It’s hard to describe. I suppose you could call it a subdued tone, kind of melancholy. It’s philosophical, too, in a way, but I love how the phrase “Ironed out” comes in – not something you’d hear from a philosopher. So it’s the interplay of “philosophicalness” and gritty phrases (“rough efficiency” and “sandboy grins” are other examples) that really makes this poem from Ruth Quinlan shine.

I’m familiar with the setting, Salthill, and I’d imagine plenty of poems have been written about it. But how many would write a poem like this? While we have some of the typical seaside elements – seagulls, candyfloss, the sea – Quinlan makes her approach different by infusing a certain sense of negativity, perhaps jealousy. There’s a real sense of back story, though it’s only hinted at (“this week, life is flat”).

This is very much a poem of observation, watching. It can be easy to make such poems dull and mono-toned. Quinlan steers clear of that. Emotions are fused with mechanical descriptions, and though we might expect such a poem to end on the sea, the idea of the sea itself watching the speaker of the poem adds something new. This is a perfect poem for a crisp December day.

Salthill Ferris Wheel
I’m eager for a bird’s perspective
on a place I know at sea level.
For the chance to see Galway Bay
through the pinhole stare of a seagull.
I’ve passed the fairground many times
during penance on the Prom –
dismissing it as the tourists’ gaudy bauble.
But this week, life is flat. Ironed out.
The routine’s carving furrows in my head.

I slide into the cherry-red seat,
ignoring raindrops on the plastic as
the attendant swings and snaps
a steel bar across my lap.
His rough efficiency makes it easy
to surrender safety to a stranger –
to a man who flashes sandboy grins
as the great wheel shudders
and I am raised above him.

The air is heavy
with burned caramels of candyfloss,
the buttered saltiness of popcorn –
the fragrance of summer holidays
and sublimated teenage desire.

The couple below begin to kiss,
dark hair falling across a cloud
of white whipped sugar
until her fingers uncurl and open
as she reaches to cup his cheek.
The forgotten floss swirls and tumbles,
landing in the carnival dust.
I comfort myself with toffee
and watch the sea watching me.

About Ruth
My mother often tells of how, when I was very young, her heart would sink when she saw me tottering towards her at bed-time, loaded down with a stack of books. I would insist on her reading every single one before I went to sleep, and if she attempted to cheat and skip ahead, I’d immediately correct her and demand that she read the story ‘properly’ (yes, I was a precocious little brat). I worshipped books and was in awe of the people who created them. This meant that, until relatively recently, it simply never occurred to me that a regular person like myself could actually produce something of that ilk.

However, since that embarrassingly belated realisation, I have been writing both short stories and poetry. Short stories came first because I bore a deep antipathy towards poetry that had been instilled in secondary school. God, I despised Yeats and his greasy tills, Kavanagh and his stony grey soil, Keats and his damn urn after memorising and regurgitating their poems ad nauseum in exam-friendly, digestible chunks. However, in 2011, I took a career break and completed the MA in Writing at NUI Galway. There, I was compelled to reconsider poetry by reading Heaney, Rilke, Duffy, Milosz, Tranströmer. Suddenly, poetry had a resonance that it never had before and I wanted more.

I work in the field of technical writing. This usually involves the creation of documentation to explain a product’s usage. It is a profession where strict principles like minimalism control the words used; technical writers are always striving to get their point across in as few words as possible while still retaining all required meaning. This can discipline a writer towards lean, muscular writing but every so often, I suffer unbearable urges to jam five adverbs and adjectives into a sentence. For this reason, it’s good to have the pressure valve of other forms of writing.

I don’t manage to get much writing done, balancing it as I do with a busy work schedule, but I have been lucky with what I have actually produced. I won the Hennessy X.O. Literary Award for First Fiction in 2013 and the Over the Edge New Writer of the Year for my poetry in 2014. My work has appeared in several publications, including the Irish Independent, ROPES, Crannóg, Emerge Literary Journal, Thresholds, and Scissors & Spackle. I have also contributed both fiction and poetry to several anthologies and am a member of the editing team behind Skylight 47, a poetry magazine based in Galway.

Interview
This strikes me as a poem primarily about loneliness. What role do you think negative emotions such as this (can) play in poetry/writing?

Would we bother writing if we were happy all the time? I don’t think nearly as many great works of literature would have been produced if Tolstoy, Joyce, Yeats, et al had the cheery dispositions of summer-camp leaders. Writing is cathartic, a way of working out some of the more negative thoughts and feelings we are hesitant in broaching to others. The vast majority of us are not trained in expressing emotions in coherent verbal form, which means it can be seen as ‘safer’ to declare frailties instead on the blank page. We’re fooling ourselves with this logic however, because, if published, our vulnerable selves are exposed to all, naked and unprotected. We try and cover ourselves with the wispy gauze of fictionality, but this is rarely sufficient, particularly in poetry.

I’d say your poem has a very story-like quality. Would you agree or disagree, and would you say there is much of a crossover between poetry and stories in general?

As I mentioned above, I actually write both short stories and poetry and strongly believe that one feeds the other. Quite often I’ll come up with an idea and try it as a story, only to find that there was actually a poem patiently hiding in the prose, waiting for me to unearth it.

You’ve included references to many different senses here (eg. touch – “rough”, scent – “burned caramels”, sight – “cherry-red”, taste – “toffee”), and these really make the experience come alive, I think. How important are the senses in writing?

In one word, critical. I have a terrible deficiency when it comes to writing – unless I can picture something in vivid detail and experience it through several senses inside my own head, the words simply won’t come. Countless hours have been wasted, trying to satisfy that craving for the minute particulars of something potentially insignificant. Does the reader really need to know which exact shade of yellow a flower is, how a waterdrop would curve down the side of its petals, whether its thorns are sharp enough to prick the skin? Probably not – but I must.

I have had conversations on this with other people who write and have learned that this isn’t the case with everybody. Others must hear characters speaking to them in order for a piece to come alive. However, the creative section of my brain seems to be deaf as I rarely hear anything internally.

Could you comment on the importance of place/locations in your writing?

This goes back to the answer above – it’s vitally important. The writing flows much smoother if I can think of a place that I have physically been in and, even better, had an emotional response to.

Why do you write?

I think there are two sides that many people switch between: a creative half and a practical, logical half. This is certainly the case with me. To survive the challenges that day-to-day life regularly throws up, I need to buckle that practical side into the driving seat. However, if I don’t write for a long period, a yearning starts to take hold. Eventually, I know that the logical side will get shoved out the window so that the creative side can grab the steering wheel for a joyride. In a nutshell, writing allows me to exist and function as a complete whole, as an (almost) sane human being.

If you had one piece of advice for a writer, what would it be?

Be kind to yourself and put the red pen away until you have finished the first draft. If you edit extensively as you write, your progress will be so slow that you’ll become completely discouraged. Get that first draft written and leave it alone before starting the editorial surgery. Many times I have started a poem, lost faith in the mess half-way through, and then resurrected it at the end – often because it morphed into an altogether different beast.

4 Comments

#27 "Poet Inherits the Fiddler’s Left Hand" by Geraldine O'Kane

1/11/2016

4 Comments

Introduction
We all have different relationships with our bodies. Some love them, and work hard to shape them into something they or others might deem “desirable”. Others hate what they’ve been given, condemned to a life of mirror-gazing and jealous scurrying through magazine pages.

In “Poet Inherits the Fiddler’s Left Hand”, Geraldine O’Kane addresses a body part – her left hand – which somehow feels like an alien appendage. There’s a hint of irony, or at least quirkiness, throughout, referring to raw deals and “musical days cut short”.

Feelings of pity and jealousy give way to guilt. The speaker of the poem seems to feel he/she has neglected the left hand, trusting it only with simple tasks like carrying cups. Contrast this with the shining example of the right hand, “writing out the best of me”. This change of feeling in the poem mirrors the changing relationship we all have with our bodies over time. This, of course, results from the changes in our bodies themselves. No matter how much we love our art, poets, fiddlers and everyone else one day have to rest their arms for good. It’s what you've done to earn that rest that matters.

Poet Inherits the Fiddler’s Left Hand
When I acquired you, I feel you got a raw deal.
Your musical days cut short
before you had time to perfect your craft.
For twenty years you were stretched on a daily basis,
just getting into the stride of retaining memory flexes.

Here you are, with me, making no more use of you
than to strain saucepans of water
carry full cups without spillage
help loop a lace or pull on a shoe.
You are infantile to this varied working life
I hold little hope, you will one day
pick up a pen to tell your own story.

Plain as the rest of me, I allow you no decoration,
no sign saying ‘look and adore me!’
More I encourage you
to work at your relationships
by staying unclasped, upturned, inviting.

You slide nail of forefinger over skin of thumb
mournfully mimicking a familial trait.
I see it as a nervous kneading and rolling;
a worrisome jealousy of the right hand.
The one I have spent my time with;
forging a strength you will never be capable of –
writing out the best of me.

The right hand has my memories running
rich through its sinew, earning the potential
to seek out its mirror image,
its comforter, its companion,
become entangled in its embrace.

You will always be a lightweight,
a bantam, a fingerling,
too little to love.

About Geraldine
I am a poet, creative writing facilitator, arts administrator and mental health advocate. My work has been published in numerous anthologies, journals and zines in Ireland, the UK and the US. I am editor of Panning for Poems and online and in print micro poetry journal.

Currently I am co-host of Purely Poetry, a monthly poetry open mic night run in partnership with the Crescent Arts Centre. I gave a TEDx Belfast Talk on Poetry and Mental Health in and read at the Poems Upstairs Series in association with Poetry Ireland Feb. I am working towards my first full collection of poetry and was a recipient of the Artist Career Enhancement Scheme (ACES) award 2015/16 from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

Interview
You have used the device of apostrophe here, addressing a non-human. Do you consciously use poetic techniques much, or do they just happen to turn up sometimes? And does the use of such techniques generally improve or hinder a poem, do you think?

I think I hit it lucky with this poem. It came from a writing exercise facilitated by Paul Bachelor, (who by the way takes workshopping poems to a whole new level!). He asked us to write about our less dominant hand. I had never really thought about it before and immediately the idea for the Fiddler’s Left Hand came to me as people always look at my hands and say, oh you have such long fingers do you play piano?! There is always a sense of disappointment when I say no; and so the poem was born. I tend to write in first person and poems are usually at least semi-biographical, aren’t all poems! I have tried many times to write in the form of objects over the years, this is perhaps only one of a small handful that have worked.

While I wonder if your main intention here was to be playful, I also wonder if this poem is allegorical. Is it important to keep the reader guessing about such things?

I think as a poet, you can rarely write a poem that doesn’t have some essence of your life experience within it, sometimes for a long time this can remain hidden from your own reading of a finished poem. I did want an element of the fantastical so people would know this was not a usual situation. I think the title shows the playfulness but there is an elemental, spiritual tone and feel to the poem that has grown on me since the first draft and through the many drafts that have followed. I enjoy it when a reader can come back to a poem and get something new from it each time, that they find layers in the poem they didn’t always find there. I feel that is very much the part the reader brings to a poem, on any given day or situation the reader will see a poem with new eyes. It is fun to have a little mystery in a poem.

This poem shows a clear awareness of a specific body part. There is a feeling that this part of the body doesn’t fit somehow. What do you feel are the effects of the feeling that parts of ourselves do not fit?

I never fitted anywhere when I was growing up. I was a wee late child, my sisters were married and gone when I was eight years old, so I didn’t have that sibling rivalry and the sociability I feel growing up with siblings brings. One of my sisters and I are very close now but that didn’t happen until I was in my twenties’ where we had the shared idea of the world and our responsibilities. I was bullied as a child and became very introverted as a result. I had very bad acne as a teenager and because I spent my time trying to hide my face, I also had bad posture. I remember when we moved to a new house once, I was out getting to know the neighbourhood kids, when one said to me, ‘you are that girl I see in town who walks with her head down, I thought there was something wrong with you!’ It has taken me a long time to understand that it’s ok to be different, to be set apart. If I could go back to my childhood self I would give her a heads up that being an adult is much less scary than being a child. People are much more tolerant and accepting of difference. Writing poetry is what got me through all of my childhood traumas and it was poetry that gave me confidence. If someone had said to me 20 years ago that I would be out reading poetry in front of people and saying actual words in between, I would have either laughed at the thought, or died at the thought. Poetry and creative writing changes lives, it opens up new connections and friendships. It clears space in your mind for more important things. It allows you to say things through metaphor and apostrophe that you would may never normally say to someone in real life. It provides an escapism of sorts. That’s what poetry did for me and I have seen it have the same effect on other people. I have met so many wonderful people through poetry, people who also feel like they don’t fit elsewhere but together we fit just fine.

There is also a sense of unfulfilled potential in your poem (“making no more use of you / than to strain saucepans of water…I hold out little hope, you will one day pick up a pen / to tell your own story”) – is this a useful feeling for the writer?

As a writer I believe there is always something new to learn, some other project, some yearning to write your magnum opus. This is a good place to be in. I like to look on the positive side of negatives.

Why do you write?

The simple answer would be because the poems and words come, that it’s something I have no control over. I never envision a time when I will never write again, if you wait long enough and have patience, a poem will always gift itself to you, even if you do nothing but wait. I talk as I write, lots, it keeps me sane, it has helped get me through some very tough situations, it allows me to get away from the world even for a small amount of time, I love getting lost in a poem and that intense euphoric feeling of a new idea for a poem just bustling around your mind.

I enjoy knowing that people connect to my poems, that they don’t have to feel any longer that a part of them does not fit. At the simplest that’s what poetry does, it allows people to know they are not alone, that someone, somewhere in the world, feels the way they have been feeling or felt. It can validate someone’s feelings and there is no need for any awkward questions or conversations. The person can just be there with the poem and their thoughts. That’s what I enjoy about reading poetry and if I can give that to someone else, then that is a gift I have been given and I will use it to the best of my ability.

If you had one piece of advice for a writer, what would it be?

Write the kind of poetry that works for you, it may not be to everyone’s taste but you have to like it. It’s the joy you bring to poetry that gives it its energy. We can’t all be Seamus Heaney, Paul Durcan or Simon Armitage but we can aspire. Write what you can, when you can, don’t be afraid of the words you want to write, and wait if the words aren’t coming, then give them time, they will find you.

4 Comments

#26 "Telephone" by Mel McMahon

1/10/2016

Introduction
Can you remember a time when a telephone was an object that would demand the attention of everyone throughout the household? Who was on the other end, everyone would wonder? A time when telephones were not dispensable objects with multiple functions to be replaced every few years, but rather long-time residents on the wall of a family home?

It’s hard not to read Mel McMahon’s poem with this sense of change and time lurking somewhere in our minds. Of course, the flavour of time and change that the poet intended was more personal. The telephone is an object weighted with sentiment and memories. It’s a symbol now of loss, or perhaps more specifically the inability to communicate.

Mel draws a comparison between telephone conversations and writing towards the end. The common ground isn’t immediately apparent, but that seems to suit the poem. The reader is left to linger on the connection, to wonder. Just as we used to wonder who was on the other end.

Telephone
For Jennifer

I

Large and white with numbers big enough
for an elephant to stand on –
my dad’s last telephone.

He would rarely use it, preferring instead
a house call.
When it rang he was often watching horse races
or getting ready to go out.

It is the phone he used
to call me, out of the blue,
one evening in France,
three days before his death,
upbeat about the summer trips
we could go on when I got home.

Holding its dead receiver in my hand,
I imagine my father listening.
My fingers tread the causeway of numbers
to a place that can’t be reached.

II

‘If your call lasts more than two minutes
it should be a letter,’ he would say.

So as teenagers, our calls were quick
to avoid dirty looks, a fight.

Now that I want to speak to him
I can only stare at this telephone,
re-imagine conversations, and write.

About Mel
I’m married to Bernadette and have two children, Claire and Mark. I spent my childhood growing up on a large housing estate in Lurgan, Co. Armagh, but now live near the quiet slopes of Slieve Gullion.

I have been a teacher for over twenty five years and in 1997 I co-founded Abbey Press with poet, Adrian Rice. (We went on to publish eighteen titles over a period of fifteen years or so.)
My debut collection of poems, Out of Breath (Summer Palace Press) was launched in April of this year.

My poetry has been published in a variety of magazines, anthologies and literary journals including: Poetry Ireland, Fortnight Magazine, Causeway and The Honest Ulsterman. It has also been broadcast on the BBC. I was a prizewinner at the FSNI poetry competition in 2015.

Outside of poetry I enjoy a game of snooker, a curry night out with friends, fly-fishing, old movies, a long swim, travelling and watching my children enjoy themselves as they grow up.

Author photo courtesy of Sinead Hoben ©

Interview
A lack of communication between fathers and sons (and maybe between men in general) is a common thread in Irish society, so it’s refreshing to experience a portrayal of a father-son relationship that’s not short on words. Could you tell us a little about your impressions of Irish men and communication?

Where do I start? I’m not too sure if it’s solely an Irish phenomenon but there is no doubt that many men can feel more than a little awkward when talking to each other about significant feelings, especially fathers when talking with their sons.

That said, I was fascinated looking at the behaviour and giant bonhomie of both sets of Irish supporters at the Euros this summer. How easily those Irish men released their joy onto the world! The steep gradient of supporters’ smiles, the volume of their content voices, the (generally) impeccable behaviour borne out of their satisfaction to see their team compete on a higher stage, amazed. Very few countries could have ignored the warmth and fun they brought to an otherwise fairly pedestrian tournament. And yet… you take away the alcohol and the sport and many Irish men can find it difficult to show emotion and articulate their feelings. I think that the situation has improved from the 1960s when Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come! came to the stage but there are certain types of communication and feeling between a father and a son that are very difficult to ‘get over the line.’ How many male readers have read Heaney’s ‘A Call’ and identified with the sentiments given?

On the last day I spent with my own father, before heading off to a holiday in France, we had a minor fall out and he spent the start of our last afternoon together talking to me via my six year old son (without making any eye contact with me). If we could have that day all over again, with all of its bitter foreknowledge, I don’t know how much different the experience would be.

I think we tend to clutch at objects when we lose someone. You’ve chosen a particularly interesting and un-obvious object here. Did you know immediately, when you first touched the phone after your father’s death, that you would write a poem about his telephone? Tell us a bit about the writing process, please.

Shortly after my mum died the sharpness of my dad’s senses declined. As a result he bought a telephone with super-sized numbers and a volume control in case he needed to make, or receive, a call. My dad was not given to making many calls. When we were teenagers we tended, like many others, to hang onto friends’/girlfriends’ conversations as if putting down the receiver would terminate our immediate oxygen supply. My father’s favourite line was, “If you’ve to chat for more than two minutes it should be a letter.” It was a great line in retrospect. I think that if I were to use it with my own children they would promptly tell me that no-one writes letters today and would ask if I’m telling them to send a text.

My dad died when we were on holiday in France but three days before it happened he phoned me, totally out of the blue, to tell me that he was in great form and was looking forward to a few outings on my return. After the month’s mind Mass my brothers, sisters and I sat down on the floor of my parents’ bedroom and quietly discussed what was to be given to charity, what was to be ‘skipped’ and what we should each take as keepsakes. I got the telephone. In those early months of grieving I held and re-visited some of the objects from my childhood home and the poem, ‘Telephone’ was one that arrived fairly quickly.

There’s an interesting structure here (especially choosing the division into two parts). Could you tell us about your attitude to structure in general in poetry, and whether you have noticed any particular patterns linking themes and structure?

I decided to structure the poem in two parts as each part seemed to capture two very distinct aspects of my dad’s relationship with the telephone– and us. The telephone is, undoubtedly, one of the most potent forms of modern communication but the end of each section of the poem tries to capture the uselessness of the phone when there is no-one at the other end to reply.

I remember reading how some grieving parents in Dublin had put their deceased child’s mobile phone in along with them when they were buried. Although the gesture is a startling and dramatic one it possibly underscores a faith in the phone as one of our most powerful forms of communication.

I do find myself structuring poems into distinct sections as I write. When my wife and I had our two children I found myself re-visiting games from childhood. Initially I thought that I would write a few poems on those games but I ended up writing close to twenty, ten of which make up the last section of my recent book, Out of Breath. I decided to give them their own section as they didn’t link thematically with other poems in the book.

As far as structuring a poem into sections is concerned, I tend only to do it when there are very distinct phases of thought or feeling. If the partitions weren’t there they could nurture a dysfunctional element to do with time, people or situations that I don’t want to be in the poem. I want my poems to speak to people not around them.

At times of loss in our lives, people often turn to poetry. Even those who usually shy away from it often find solace or profundity in it at such times, I think. Why do you think this is?

I think that Brodsky said in his Nobel Prize winning speech that if language is what separates us from other animals then poetry is the goal of our species.

For me, language, especially poetry, has the ability to help us travel further into ourselves. Yes, words can hurt, damage and alienate but when a positive thought or feeling is crystallised in an image, a rhythm, or form it can induce a lift, a confidence, an acceptance, a connection with that part of ourselves that many would call spiritual. Whenever my parents died I found lines from Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations on Immortality’ invaluable in helping me to accept the awful carnage of grief that goes hand-in-hand with being human.

Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;

The balance, the dignity and defiance in those lines gave me great focus to face the loss.

Why do you write?

It’s a very cheap form of self-medication that keeps me sane and constantly helps me to remember that being here is special and should not to be taken for granted. It helps me to find links between aspects of being alive and often it helps me to see life more clearly. Poems have helped me to discover things about myself and have also helped me to temporarily reclaim moments from my life that I want to keep in focus.

I love that feeling when a poem starts to form and you go hunting for pen and paper. The agitation, the disturbance, the excitement that writing a poem brings is hard to describe. I also love that unique, brief sense of equilibrium that returns shortly after the writing of a poem.

If you had one piece of advice for a writer, what would it be?

Don’t see publication solely as the end goal when you are involved in the writing process. Be patient. Bide your time. Let your poems grow from draft to draft. When they are ready, let them go. Letting them go too soon is like sending a twelve year old out to an over eighteen disco. Their time will come.

Write about what you know and who you know. Write because you enjoy it and try to be as honest to yourself as possible. Be genuine. If you can, keep a routine. A writer is, after all, someone who writes, not someone who just thinks and talks about it. There will be many off days when you doubt your work but that goes with the territory.

5 Comments

#25 "Marsh" by Paul Casey

1/9/2016

Introduction
Having heard that Cork is named after the Irish word for “marsh”, and knowing Paul is based there, I had a fair idea what this poem would be about when I saw the title. The way the poet went about it, though, surprised me. I’ve come across pieces from the point of view of an object or an animal, but never, that I can remember, a city.

And what kind of person would you expect such a manifestation of Cork to be? (No jokes, please. There’s no “Cork is great!” here.) It’s revealed to have a somewhat philosophical voice, weary with experience, an observer of change. The “mane of reed” becomes pylons and beggars over time.

Writing about place is a standard practice in poetry, but it usually involves the poet divulging details of his/her relationship with that place, entwined with memories and emotions. Thinking about it that way, what Paul Casey does here is quite a selfless act, an act of giving voice to the city of Cork. And why not give back to that from which we take so much? This is a poem of generosity and imagination. Think about it the next time you’re strolling the streets of Cork.

Marsh
I was all bog and bits of islands
My bird-heavy mane of reed
a river of lyrical russet
A Celtic hunter slowing his currach
to the heartbeat of a wayward doe

I grew wooden bridges and jetties
Ramparts and Towers cupped huts
and dirt roads. Smoke rose nightly
from the duels of swords and harps

I sank heavier with merchants and markets
Cobblestones, cannons kept alehouses then
Top hats and summer umbrellas tilted
to soldiers and carriages. Oil street
lamps lit stocks and paupers
Men and metal stitched me whole

Now I sleep with buses and pipes
Pylons and beggars reflected thrice in glass
Mobile phones and mini-skirts flirt my name
while coffee-shop buskers point tourists to pavement art

What will I not endure?

(Photo by John Minihan)

About Paul
I’ve been writing poetry for about 25 years now, and seriously for the past 15. I also have a filmmaking background, and consequently a special affinity for poetry films. My second collection Virtual Tides appeared from Salmon Poetry in early 2016. My début is Home more or less (Salmon, 2012). A chapbook, It’s Not all Bad, appeared from the Heaventree Press in 2009. I also edit the annual Unfinished Book of Poetry (transition year writing), work with the elderly through poetry appreciation during the Bealtaine festival and am the founder/director of Ó Bhéal in Cork, at www.obheal.ie.

Interview
Writing from the point of view of a non-human speaker, such as an object or place, can be a tricky thing to pull off, I'd imagine. What are the most interesting and challenging aspects of this approach?

I think one is faced with very specific challenges when pursuing an anthropomorphic approach to a poem. It's one I teach with, to help develop empathy (within the craft). Speaking from the point of view of an object often reveals more to the writer about themselves than about the object (which may be exactly what the poem wants). But aside from the potentially distressing notion of identifying with the non-sentient world, I think the poem's symbolic foundations need to be much stronger and more complex than usual - for it to succeed well. It'll work better with some objects than others, depending mostly on the writer's personality, tastes and experience. I identify more with the spirit of a salmon than a dolphin. More with a cheetah than a lion. A three-dimensional spiral, than a sphere. Which doesn't mean I won't attempt the voice of a dolphin or lion or ball to represent someone or some place else. I can still imagine what it is to be a lion, and I'd prefer to be in a cage with it than sit through the torture of a Strasberg method acting session, trying to 'be the teapot'. Or writing from the perpective of a tennis ball, without any strong sense of symbolic connection or purpose.

As I've lived mostly in cities, I find them much easier to identify with than towns. People often personify cities in everyday speech, so it wasn't a strange notion. 'Prague welcomed us with open arms', 'Paris can be cruel', etc. I identify with Cork much more so, of course, as I'm from here. And I love the idea of a great silent witness-spirit, benevolent or otherwise. Yet, a tree in a forest or laneway may be no less significant, in terms of symbolic potential. In fact, I usually find the simpler the image the more effective the metaphor. But not always. Marsh is the enduring collective voice of Cork city, embodying the histories of its generations, since long before any humans. So in this sense it's also an environmental piece (another of my prevailing themes). I have often sought to describe the spirit of a city. The title poem in home more or less personifies Dublin, which 'talks in its sleep, softly''. I also love the idea of a passive, sagacious witness, persisting across the ages. Like the many lives of Fintan mac Bóchra. With a city like Cork and its palimpsest of exquisite stories, I found it easy to personify, to transmogrify into an underling of that wise gentle spirit of sparse words (time), so the complexity of the city could be rendered simple, or at the very least, less intimidating. The poem was one of those rare gifts - it came to me very, very quickly. But simply put after having said all that - I love history, I love Cork and I love poetry. It was a three-way made in heaven.

The theme of a town changing is more associated with songs, I think (eg. "The Town I Loved So Well", "The Rare Oul' Times"). Were you conscious of this, or did you feel that music influenced you here in any way?

Music is central to my poems. To me, without it there is simply no poem. As the renowned Lesego Rampolokeng once wrote, 'it all begins with sound'. I wasn't conscious of it though, no, not any more so than usual. Of course Cork is a city of music in its own right too, so I imagined harpists vying for patronage along its bustling streets, centuries ago.

By the end, it seems that this poem is a lament. Do you think poetry is particularly suited to lamenting?

I'd say “Marsh” is more of a praise poem than a lament, although there is a (necessary) strain of the latter, keening out from the string section. Loss and endurance are obviously not mutually exclusive within human experience. Still, to me they are inevitable, inseperable companions. I feel that poetry and song hold equal potential for the lament. Both are entirely suitable, sorrow being expressed most poignantly, I feel, via the human voice. Probably much more so than through any other art form.

The past features strongly in this poem. Could you tell us about how the past informs your writing in general?

I've always been magnetically lured by history and to the context and understanding it ultimately offers. I probably read more history than any other form of prose and I certainly watch more historical fiction than any other film genre (outside of poetry-films). So there's often an historical aspect at play, while overall my work is eclectic in content and can ignore history entirely.

Why do you write?

Often I haven't a clue why, sometimes for the craic, but I'd guess mostly for discovery and often for personal transformation. Sometimes its educational potential, or simply to celebrate. When it's hot I think of jumping into the sea, and do if I'm able. When I get itchy feet I go a-wandering. When I'm overly curious about something I think about teasing out its secrets, which often show me my own, and for that my hand reaches for a pen. It's the best way I know how to offer form to the unspoken. To the new. To my new.

If you had one piece of advice for a writer, what would it be?

Read and write. Read a poem every day from a known poet, then another from an unknown poet. You could make a rule: if the first poem you read leaves you disappointed or wanting, keep reading others until you find one that surprises you, or at least shows you something new. It can be as quick as making coffee and will filter straight into your neural database of what's possible. And write a poem every day too, no matter how short or ridiculous. Eventually you'll be equipped for a masterpiece. For when it arrives. It's up to the gods then.

(The video below is taken from Balcony TV. Paul gives a short interview, and reads both “Marsh” and other work)

6 Comments

#24 "That Pomegranate Shine" by Lori Desrosiers

1/8/2016

Introduction
Experience can often be a wearying process. Lori Desrosiers deals with the subject in a mythic way, although the poem’s first line sets the context very directly. After this, she “borrows” the story of an Armenian song and blends it in to suit her theme.

If you conducted a survey today asking random people to quote a line of poetry, the chances are that many would quote something that might be considered romantic. But modern poets themselves, as Desrosiers does here, often play against this sense of poetry and romance being intertwined. There’s a certain going-against-the-expected, too, in how the poet uses the sense of shining. We think of “losing your shine” as a negative thing, but here, I think, the shine suggests that the poem’s speaker has had a difficult experience.

In modern poetry, I think it’s more usual to see experience dealt with in brief moments, rather than dealing with periods of years. The fact that Desrosiers chose the latter lends the poem quite an old-school feel. And maybe that’s appropriate for the long-established practice of marriage in human cultures. But the poet gives us a warning here, a touch of realism to balance the romance. And we all need a bit of both in our lives.

That Pomegranate Shine
          Two brides arise from the river, shivering and shining
          like pomegranate seeds.
                             --Words from an Armenian Song

I was the wrong kind of bride,
more sweat than glisten,
more peach than pomegranate.
At twenty-three, in love with marriage,
not the man,
I plunged into rough water,
bringing grandmother’s candlesticks,
mother’s books and two silver trays.
Ten years later, I emerged shivering,
dragging my ragged volumes,
one candlestick and two babies.
On the bank, I shook off the water
and breathed.
Standing with my children,
looking out over the river,
the new brides asked me where
I got that pomegranate shine.

About Lori
I am a late-bloomer. I went back to school at age fifty for my M.F.A. in poetry at New England College while teaching English Composition locally as an adjunct professor. Before that, I had four other lives, trying to navigate two bad marriages and a subsequent life as a single parent, moving north from New York to Connecticut. For a few years I tried my hand at being a singer-songwriter, writing about twenty-five original songs (I sing and play guitar) and making a CD in 1998. That was a good year for me. I moved from Connecticut to Massachusetts, found work as a teacher and met my husband Gary, who is still with me after eighteen years and I think I may let him stay at least eighteen more. I have two grown daughters and a stepson, and a wonderful two-year-old grandson.

I grew up in New York, in New York City and Westchester County, where I played violin in school. I have a degree in French Literature and one in Education. I am a singer as well, and have performed in musical theater, in choirs, coffee houses and at festivals. I have two published books of poetry, both from Salmon Poetry. The Philosopher’s Daughter (2013) was my first full-length book and is about my parents, my rather eccentric family and my journey through and out of domestic abuse. My father was a professor of Philosophy and died of brain cancer when I was 28, so the book title is for him. The poem is from this book, and is pretty much the story of my first marriage in a nutshell.

My new and second book of poems is Sometimes I Hear the Clock Speak, (2016) and it is about music, voices, time and memory. It has been a joy to have my book published by Salmon and I have traveled to Ireland twice in the past three years. I read in Ennistymon at the Salmon bookshop and at the Courthouse Gallery there, and also in the Over the Edge series at the Galway Library. I hope to return soon again.

My poems have appeared in numerous anthologies (including Even the Daybreak, Salmon’s 35th anniversary anthology) and in journals such as New Millennium Review, Contemporary American Voices, Best Indie Lit New England, String Poet, Blue Fifth Review, Pirene's Fountain, The New Verse News, and The Mom Egg. I publish and edit Naugatuck River Review, a journal of narrative poetry, and teach English Composition and American Literature at Westfield State University and Poetry in the interdisciplinary program of Lesley University’s M.F.A. program.

Interview
What can disillusionment teach us?

Certainly we should learn from our mistakes. In this particular poem, awakening to a bad choice in romance results in empowerment as an independent person and single parent. Real recovery is hard. Some of us take longer than others to “shake off the water and breathe.”

Was the poem itself inspired by the lyrics of the Armenian song that you quote? Please tell us a little about the process of inspiration and development for this poem and for your writing in general.

The epigraph is about 50% responsible for the inception of this poem. I heard a song sung live in concert by a group (Qadim Ensemble) who performs songs from all over the Middle East and Eastern Europe. I was particularly moved by this one, and was able to get the translation when I bought their CD. It is also inspired by James Wright’s image of women rising out of the river in his poem “In Response to a Rumor That the Oldest Whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia Has Been Condemned” where he writes, “What time near dawn did they climb up the other shore, / Drying their wings?” I wrote my MFA critical paper on the image of water and rivers in Wright’s work. I also have a lot of rivers in my poems. I grew up on the shore of the Hudson and have lived by rivers all my life.

With the mention of the mother and grandmother, you seem to suggest that we’re destined to repeat the same mistakes as our parents/ancestors before us. Why do you think it’s so difficult for humans to learn from the recurring mistakes of others?

I read recently that our mothers’ suffering remains in our DNA. We’re all descended from people who have struggled, with violence or poverty, starvation or persecution. It’s not surprising to me that we are having trouble overcoming our genetic tendency to become victims instead of empowering ourselves to create peace. I also see a decline in the quality of education due to over-testing and a de-emphasis on the arts. This causes the recent generations to have less understanding of history, so we are, as they say, doomed to repeat it. I really believe we can overcome this, but we have to be vigilant and work together.

Why do you think a person would be in love with marriage, more so than his/her partner?

In my case, I blame my youth and naïveté. I didn’t know him well enough before we married. I loved the idea of marriage, of creating family. We can also be in love with love, where we have an unrealistic image of the person we are with.

Why do you write?

I write because I am driven to write. It is a way to process emotions and respond to events. Also, going to that place some refer to as “poet mind” gives me great pleasure.

If you had one piece of advice for a writer, what would it be?

Read. Read great writing. Read some more. The more great writers’ work you read, the better your writing will become.

6 Comments

#23 "Fishing" by Eleanor Hooker

15/7/2016

Introduction
It’s hard to describe the tone of this poem. I suppose you could call it menacing. When I read it, I imagine it coming from the voice of a child in a horror film. And that certainly isn’t the feeling I typically get when reading a poem. So, to say this poem from Eleanor Hooker is original is quite an understatement.

The imagery here is otherworldly. We get a three-eyed fish with urns in its belly, within which very odd ash trees grow. Mercury-filled cataracts aren’t exactly a poet’s stock-in-trade either. All of this follows a simple, unassuming title, “Fishing”. Also simple is the refrain between each verse. This simple-complicated dynamic creates a certain tension in the fabric of the poem itself and reminds me of the approach taken in the Bob Dylan song “I Want You”.

The biggest question a reader is left with here is: what exactly is the poem about? Certainly, it seems allegorical, and those last two lines appear to suggest that emotions were to the fore in the writer’s mind. Which is kind of ironic, considering fish are said not to feel pain. Learning to breathe beneath the water could refer to anything (I’m sure different readers will have wildly varying interpretations when they read below). Maybe it refers to suppressing emotions – at least that’s the only half-convincing interpretation I could give. And what a richer experience reading the poem is by having those emotions suppressed, rather than a bland, more straightforward approach. Of course, I could be way off the mark. But does it really matter?

Fishing
One, Two, Three four five,
Once I caught a fish alive.

It had three urns in its belly,
inside of each an ash tree grew,
one had Granddad's face on its trunk,
another had Old Grandpa's hands in its branches,
the third had Old Granny's smile in its roots.

Six, seven, eight nine ten,
I had to let it go again.

It had three eyes, unusual for any fish,
one eye saw the world beneath the water,
the second looked, but never saw,
the third had a mercury-filled cataract
that told the future in filigree pictures.

Why did you let it go?

I let it go because it was a Pike.
I know that now, and know too
how Pike will find their own way home.
And look, it bit my finger so.

Which finger did it bite?

The little finger on the right.
It choked, this will stop you telling, then it smiled.
But I’ve always known my way,
and have learned to breathe beneath the water.

About Eleanor
My husband Peter and I went to the UK to work, ‘for one year’ and arrived home in 2002, fourteen years later, with our two sons and a cat.
I’m from south Tipperary originally, and now live in Dromineer, north Tipp.

My debut collection of poems, The Shadow Owner’s Companion (Dedalus Press) was shortlisted for the Strong/Shine award for best first collection from 2012. My second collection A Tuf of Blue is being published by the Dedalus Press in October 2016.

Earlier this year my flash fiction The Lesson was awarded First Prize by Richard Skinner in the Bare Fiction, Flash Fiction competition in the UK.

My poetry has been published in a variety of magazines, anthologies and literary journals including: Poetry, PN Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Agenda, The Stinging Fly, The SHOp, The Moth, The Irish Times, The Irish Examiner, and POEM: International English Language Quarterly and online at Southword, And Other Poems, Poethead, Ink Sweat and Tears, The Ofi Press, and broadcast on RTÉ Radio One.

I’m a founding member and Programme Curator for the Dromineer Literary Festival. I’m a helm and Press Officer for the Lough Derg RNLI Lifeboat.
I hold an MPhil in Creative Writing (Distinction) from Trinity College, Dublin, an MA (Hons) in Cultural History from the University of Northumbria, and a BA (Hons 1st) from the O.U. I began my career as a nurse and midwife. http://eleanorhooker.com/

Interview
Your first collection, The Shadow Owner’s Companion, has poems which seem to draw inspiration from set forms such as villanelles, incantations and, as with this poem, nursery rhymes, with a hint of the magical/mythical. In what way do you go about drawing inspiration from such forms?

There are occasions when my poems need, well… not exactly a straight jacket, but the regulatory discipline of form, so whilst meanings range free, my tendency towards wordiness is contained.
Nursery rhymes and incantations suggest the magical and the mythical, certainly, but their strangeness also suggests the uncanny. Many of the nursery rhymes we chanted as children have disturbing subtexts; jaunty ditties that bely their sinister undercurrent. I like that, the skittering, the disorientation this device brings to poems.

My favourite lullaby of all time is the one in Pan’s Labyrinth, no words, just that elegiac humming. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19bBGxf5k6k

Fish are mysterious, maybe even monstrous, creatures in your poems, it seems to me, and they come to the surface quite often in your collection. How do you see the symbolism of fish working in your poetry?

Interesting that you say they “come to the surface”. In many of my poems, all sorts of menace are represented by Pike, poor Pike, and yet it represents the perfect predator. Here’s what Ted Hughes had to say of them in his poem “Pike”

Pike, three inches long, perfect
Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.
Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.
They dance on the surface among the flies.

In the poem “Fishing”, fish symbolise an emotional current and the speaker’s willingness to react and interact within that environment.

Linked with such symbolism is the sheer intensity that comes through in your work. This seems very much connected with the water, as well as fish. Do you take a certain approach in order to convey such intensity in your poems?

Thanks, Trevor. Poetry functions differently for each of us, I need my poetry to be as truthful as it is possible for it to be, even if I’m describing a lie. Exercises in word choreography for the sake of the dance is meaningless for me, those poems are a form of lonely miming, silent gorgeousness.

I need the music too. Each word I use in a poem is considered, some fortuitous accidents do occur, but if the effect on you, reading my poems, is of their intensity, then the words I’ve chosen have done their job, and those poems have provided me with another dance partner.

Many of your poems are quite surreal. Are there particular surrealist poets you look to for inspiration?

I read everyone and everything, we have poetry books all over the house, in case of an emergency. Lists are dangerous things, but here are just some of the poets I admire greatly for the strange and surreal elements of their poetry: George Szirtes, Pascale Petit, Helen Ivory, Traci Brimhall, Charles Simic, Melissa Lee-Houghton, Aleksandar Ristović, Vasko Popa, and Tomas Tranströmer, Robin Robertson, Geoffrey Hill, Emily Berry, Kim Moore, Yves Bonnefoy, Catherine Ann Cullen and Kristin Dimitrova.

Why do you write?

I just need to. When I don’t get to write, I’m like a hoor on a Honda 50 screeching uphill in fifth gear with the brakes on and diesel in the petrol tank. Not pretty.

If you had one piece of advice for a writer, what would it be?

Love like your heart has a million chambers, and don’t lose faith when the muse fancies herself a mechanic and is off for days attempting to fix the Honda 50.

0 Comments

#22 "Dropped Calves, Sucklers, Weanlings and Steers" by Lynda Tavakoli

1/7/2016

Introduction
I’ve never been to a mart, but now, I want to go to one. As with fiction, poetry has the power to transport the reader to another world. Here, Lynda Tavakoli takes us to the mart. It’s the level of detail she provides that really seals it – the gavel, the concrete, the “meringue-crisp manure”.

Such detail is also very specific to the language used at a mart. The one quote which appears in the poem conveys both technical terms (at least to a non-farming lad like me) and the rhythm of the man MCing the events, delivered like a rapper desperate to finish s song before a very necessary toilet break.

I suppose what’s also interesting is the fact that most of us have regular experience with a certain element of the whole mart process – the meat that is on these animals. We all know where it is destined to go, and anyone eating at a plate knows where his/her meat came from, but he/she rarely even considers the butcher’s blade even as he/she slices with a knife. That’s another thing poetry does – it often makes us stop and think.

Dropped Calves, Sucklers, Weanlings and Steers
Their lowing drenches
these redundant pens
and seeps through concrete floors
like blottered ink,
while in a shed
the gavel sleeps
its gunshot condemnation
silent only after the bidding.

“Dropped calves, sucklers,
weanlings, steers,”
the wet-nosed breath of them
hangs still,
its droplets dripping fear
on crusted pats
of meringue-crisp manure.

No sentiment soils
this soulless place,
only the cold stare
of hard men born to it,
their business done
with spit and shake
to seal the deal.

And under a gavel’s silence
hums the lament
of those condemned,
carted to slaughter
and a butcher’s slab.

About Lynda
Over the years I’ve tried my hand at most writing genre. Journalistic pieces have sometimes landed me in hot water while short stories have revealed to me a macabre side of my personality I didn’t know I had but it is poetry that allows me to connect most with ordinary people. More and more I’m drawn to writing poems with subject matter that is uncomfortable and sometimes painful to confront but as I get older it’s important to me to be honest about my own life experiences. The reader, after all, will usually recognise an imposter. So my poetry is that old thing – the eclectic mix, and if any of it manages to have a resonance with someone else then I have achieved something that I’m proud of. My poems have seen success in The Irish Times/Hennessy Poetry of the Month, Listowel and various anthologies but I am presently working hard to put my own collection together. Several months spent writing in the Middle East recently has given me a new focus which I hope will be reflected in my latest poetry.

Interview
Farming appears to be an ideal/popular subject for poetry. Why do you think this is?

Farming, animal rights, what we’re doing to the planet – yes, popular and controversial subjects that are fundamental to our lives and what better way to confront them than through verse? I teach in an inner-city school where many of the children have little or no experience of the countryside, so poetry can often prove to be a fun way of establishing that important connection. “Duck’s Ditty” by Kenneth Grahame, for example, was the first poem I ever learned by rote (along with a lot of tittering) yet several decades later it still lingers in some small corner of my brain. Essentially, I think that any poetry that allows us to connect with nature and the environment or encourages respect for the countryside is all to the good.

This is a very atmospheric poem. How important is conveying an atmosphere to poetry, or to certain types of poetry?

Aesthetic or emotional meaning is an important element in all of my poems and to me this constitutes atmosphere. The attempt to transfer a mood or feeling to someone else is so very difficult to achieve but wonderful when it is found, and it is something I continually search for. Regardless of the form of a poem (which of course can create atmosphere in itself), it is how people relate to the words that really matter in my opinion. I view poetry in the same way that I view visual art in that I want to understand what is in front of me and be touched by it in some way.

Were you aware of any particular influences on your writing here or in your poetry in general?

Oh yes. My childhood was a fusion of polar opposite experiences – weekdays living in a large town and weekends on an island on Lough Erne with no electricity or modern amenities. The latter (although time-wise the lesser of the two), has had a profound effect on me and colours my thinking even now. Most of what I write, whether poetry or prose, has in many ways been moulded by what was gifted to me back then by my parents – simplicity, kindness and the freedom to be myself. The poetry collection that I’m working on at the moment contains more than a few poems connected with those formative years.

Did this poem take you long to write, and did it require much research, or was it written purely from personal experience/memory?

It took as long as the editing process allowed it to take; whittled down to the bare bones and me finally saying, “Enough”. But something strange happened with this poem – it has transmuted into something else. What was initially penned as an observation regarding the cold reality of an animal’s demise has, for me, become an unintentional metaphor for the recent refugee crisis. On the day that I came upon that mart and those sad signs differentiating the various types of livestock, I little thought of relating their suffering to human beings. But poems often have lives of their own and this one has marched into a new political meaning that I did not foresee. The fear of the unfamiliar, the hopelessness and impending sense of doom that resonated from those empty pens are redolent of what we can be as a society and I hope that perhaps one day I will be able to re-write the ending.

Why do you write?

I’m not altogether sure why I write. Because I enjoy it? Because I don’t? (And often I don’t.) It depends on what I’m writing at the time. My poetry is always honest writing, mostly from personal experience, whereas my short stories allow me to explore the human condition in a much more experimental and perverse way. If I’m really being truthful I actually write for myself, leaving the reader to make of it what they will and if they see something differently then that is alright too.

If you had one piece of advice for a writer, what would it be?

Try not to take rejection too personally!

5 Comments

#21 "When Colours Run" by Neil Slevin

15/6/2016

Introduction
Artists need to invent in reaction to death. I’m not a big fan of broad statements applied to all artists, but this is one I would say applies to nearly all. It’s a time-worn theme, of course, but some come up with interesting ways to say what we’ve heard before. Neil Slevin enlists the help of history here, as well as two giants of the English language – Shakespeare and the King James Bible.

Clearly, this is a poem that harks back to the past, but the future is also a central concern. We all have some sense of a legacy at the back of our minds, and, at the end of the day, this is all we will have when time catches up with us and we become part of the past.

Slevin tackles the theme in a fairly indirect way here, without drawing himself into the poem, which gives it a story-like quality. It’s also the sense of the mythic that really captured my attention here. The emperor that Slevin describes is an example of a vain attempt to outdo time (in both senses of the word in this case). When faced with thoughts of death, there is a little emperor in all of us.

When Colours Run
        The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
           Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun.
                                                                   W.H. Auden

Old men tell the story of Cathay’s emperor,
a man who avoided the future,
who in his divine wisdom, and facing death,
forbade his people from using the future tense
because without him they could have no future.

And they muse about time and how we tell it,
highlight that before Christ we had no such thing,
that after His birth we had options.
Did you ever make that mistake at school,
believing that A.D. meant After Death?

Wiser now, I wonder if men like Cathay and Christ,
Macbeth and Othello were one,
perhaps not in face or nature, but in outlook:
believing that time would wait for them
to find their way back from the ether

as if they could forbid the wind
from breath and stars from smile,
their fellow man from a life of dreams and death
while they packed up their moon
and dismantled our sun.

About Neil
I am a 26 year-old writer from Co. Leitrim. An English teacher, having graduated with a B.Sc. in Physical Education with English from the University of Limerick in 2011, I have returned to university to complete an M.A. in Writing at N.U.I. Galway and to pursue a writing-based career.

I write for Sin (N.U.I. Galway's student newspaper), editing its entertainment section and culture column, Resonate, and as Events Reporter for the Institute for Lifecourse and Society (an N.U.I. Galway campus centre providing community-based initiatives for the local area).

Since September 2015, I was SMITH Magazine’s Writer of the Month for October, and have won various awards, including Creative Writing Ink Journal’s writing prompt competition for October-November 2015 and Cultured Vultures’ poem of the week competition. My poetry has been published by The Galway Review and numerous international journals, including Scarlet Leaf Review and Artificium: The Journal.

Interview
History and myth are often friends to poetry, I feel, in that they tend to blend well into poems. Would you agree or disagree, and could you comment on how you approached this here?

History and myth are often poetry’s friends, and they do blend well into poems, but I think this is a tradition that’s dying out. In my opinion, contemporary poetry is more concerned with contemporary issues, and that’s something I am happy to encourage and be part of. Modern writers should respond to the here and now. They should look to the future, rather than harp back.

I like the idea of poetry becoming a historical source. A good poem can become its own piece of history, one that readers reflect on once enough time has passed since its creation, and the moment it crystallises.

My poem was inspired by my reading of John Banville’s novel The Infinities, which in turn was inspired by von Kleist’s play Amphitryon. I was struck by the character Adam facing death as he lay in a coma, still conscious of his surroundings, life and his family going on around him. The idea that no man – even a mathematician of Adam’s ability, who dedicated his life to solving life’s problems – can escape death’s inevitability was a catalyst for this piece.

In the text, Cathay’s emperor also features as an anecdote; his directive resonates. As a child (I was painful to deal with even then), I struggled with the idea that I was just one speck in a world full of them. It’s something I still struggle to accept. I want to believe that I exist for a reason, that my existence and my actions matter, and that they will continue to matter when I die.

How would you describe the role of mortality/death in your work, and how do you think it affects the work of other writers?

Mortality doesn’t play a significant role within my work; I’m told I haven’t lived or lost enough. And I hope I won’t reach that point in life any time soon. To me, mortality constitutes finding the occasional white hair, not being able to run a lap as quickly or as easily as the teenage me could, etc.

But when I step outside of myself, considering death confronts me with the realisation that the people I love and care for won’t be around forever. I am starting to think about and deal with that reality, but I doubt I’ll be ready for when those moments come.

On the other hand, grief and loss, not to mention longing for what might have or could have been, are motifs that you will find in much of my writing. I am one of the world’s worst losers, I find it very hard to let go, and grief and loss are such natural, universal emotions, hence their presence in a number of my poems. I “harp back” because I tend to write what I think and feel, things I cannot always express through speech.

When I write, I run with what comes out, so a lot of my poetry is based on my experiences and my responses to them. A comrade has convinced me that, as a fledgling writer, you have to flush yourself out, so if a poet has lost something or someone important to them, you can expect to sense this within their work.

Writers tend to write about what they know first and then, when they’ve run out, they become more resourceful because they have to create and generate ‘new’ material. I now have to look for ideas to pursue and look forward, rather than look back. I think this pattern is particularly true for poetry. For me, it’s such a personal, insular craft; I often cannot escape myself.

The King James Bible and Shakespeare have both had a huge influence on the English language, and maybe our perspectives/consciousness in general. Could you tell us how you came to include both of these in this poem, and whether their inclusion was somehow inevitable even before you embarked on the first draft?

The Infinities spurred this poem into being. Before I’d read it, I don’t think I’d given my own mortality any serious thought. Reading about Cathay’s emperor drove me to think about Christ, and my nomad mind progressed to thinking about Macbeth, a character who took hold of me in 4th year of secondary school and never let go.

Charles J. Haughey’s story is also an influence. Last year I read a book and watched the RTÉ drama series about Haughey in the months preceding my first draft of “When Colours Run”. Like Cathay, Macbeth, and Othello, Haughey seems to have been obsessed by his own mortality and legacy; he even quoted Othello in his final speech as Taoiseach.

Looking back, attending a Catholic primary school engrained a sense of religion within me. Though I am no longer particularly religious, I think a certain level of faith remains part of me. My being able to believe and hope for something greater in life is important, and though I’m not a practising Catholic, religion is something I’ve neither extracted myself from nor developed any real desire to leave behind.

As for Shakespeare, I think so much of his work, particularly his tragedies, maps out the defining thoughts and experiences of our lives. For me, the most beautiful and frightening aspect of Shakespeare’s work is that no matter what you are thinking or feeling, there is probably a Shakespearian character or quotation that deals with the same experience.

Sticking with religion, and putting you on the spot now, do you think religion (in general, and particular religions) should be taught in school? What do they have to offer, and what are the drawbacks?

I do think that schools should teach some form of religious education, but that it should be a more “ecumenical matter”. Father Ted allusions aside, imparting a knowledge and understanding of people’s beliefs and values to our young people is very important. Though I think that my primary school experience was overly religious, I respect the experience because it grounded me.

I attended a secondary school with a “community” ethos. Although Catholicism still influenced our school’s practice, people of other faiths and cultures were, I believe, made to feel welcome. Their beliefs and values were respected and catered for.

As a student, I enjoyed Religious Education. Learning about the cornerstones of other faiths helped me to understand people of other cultures and religions, and the subject helped to prepare me for the society we now live in, one where religion and people’s beliefs are contentious issues.

I think schools should continue to teach R.E., but the subject needs to retain and develop its breadth and inclusivity. It should be for students of every system of beliefs, including agnosticism, but it shouldn’t be compulsory. If people don’t wish to study it, they shouldn’t be forced to. Religion should be a choice, rather than an expectation.

Why do you write?

I write because I am driven to, because it’s what I am best at. I never tire of working with words, and I strive constantly to better my work with them. One of my earliest poems, “My Escape”, best explains my relationship with writing: “I write to be and escape me”.

If you had one piece of advice for a writer, what would it be?

People might think that writing’s a solitary art, but you shouldn’t isolate yourself. I’ve learned a lot and produced most of my best work as a result of working with others.

Don’t be afraid to take that class, ask others to critique your work, be rejected, etc. It’s all part of the process. I read somewhere that every person is a writer. From when we wake up until we fall asleep, we write – in our thoughts, our actions, our speech. But so much of what we write never makes it to the page.

Go out, meet people, and live a life worth writing about; words will find their way to you.

5 Comments

#20 "Swan, Heron, Ducks" by Pete Mullineaux

1/6/2016

3 Comments

Introduction
Perhaps the most prominent feature of the poem, for me, was its tone. It’s the only poem I’ve come across where the first word I’d use to describe it (and especially its tone) is “patient”. And that’s despite the use of run-on lines, which usually create a sense of urgency in a poem.

There’s an odd mix of the quiet and the melodramatic here. Odd in the sense that the combination works so well. It’s quite like a classical tune luring us into lulls, followed by crescendos such as “tuning feathers; then like a great winged / accordion at the heart of this session, flamboyant / flapping brings wind and sound to the picture”.

At heart, this is a nature poem which, in many ways, feels like a poem about people. Maybe we are so used to birds doing very bird-like things such as flying that the unusual descriptions here resonate on a deeper level. And it feels as though simple acts such as dipping and diving have extra meaning for the animals themselves. Conveying this is evidence of the poet’s skill, and such deeper meaning is, I think, something we associate with good poetry.

Swan, Heron, Ducks
The surface on the canal tonight: black cellophane.
And music without volume – here in overlapping
rhythmic channels of water birds. On her island nest
a white goddess folds an angular neck, arranging
and tuning feathers; then like a great winged
accordion at the heart of this session, flamboyant
flapping brings wind and sound to the picture.

Across the weir, her partner raps with an old heron –
bird banter between tunes, before the grey one swoops
above the reeds towards a suitable platform for business;
no show, motionless now on spindly fiddle-bow legs –
content to sit this one out, waiting perhaps for a call
to sing an old heron song – and all this time, weaving
in their own patterns, the coming and going of ducks,
silver-grey in the moonlight, tracking their own
invisible melody, dipping and diving…

About Pete
When I was 13 I had a poem selected for an anthology, Poetry & Song, published by Macmillan. It was then recorded on an album with music by Ewan MacColl & Peggy Seeger. This gave me an early introduction to the connections between poetry and song, and I’ve been fascinated by that since. Living in London in the 80’s I was part of the performance poetry scene but also in a left wing rock/punk band The Resisters, we toured Germany and made an album for Munich’s Trikont Records. When the band split I performed solo as Pete Zero, doing lots of festivals like Glastonbury and political events and some fun gigs alongside such luminaries as the Pogues.

Coming back to Ireland with my partner Moya Roddy and daughter Cassie in the early 90’s I brought a mandolin with me and wanted to learn Irish Traditional Music. I took up the fiddle as well and I’ve been learning since! My interest in the connections between poetry and music continued and I published my third collection, Session (Salmon Poetry) in 2011, exploring music and sound in nature and in human interaction, with a particular focus on Irish traditional music. The book has had a wonderful response, not just in literary circles, but I’m pleased to say from musicians and music publications.

Interview
Some people, when they hear “it’s a nature poem” tune out automatically, I find, as if they have a preconceived notion of something boring to follow. What do you think a poet must be mindful of when setting out to write a nature poem?

That’s one huge area of activity and experience given the cold shoulder! The world, the plants, animals, human beings, the universe! It’s hard for me to contemplate nature being boring. Yes, I do write some poems about or inspired by nature, but there are plenty of others that are urban, or about people, or city landscapes – I wouldn’t distinguish between them in terms of approach to subject matter, except, yes, there will be different music to any poem. But even here I like the idea of challenging expectations. No reason why the music of a poem about a flock of birds such as starlings, circling and dipping shouldn’t sound like a jazz riff. Or a city scene in a shopping centre or car park, use “flow” as you would in a poem about a river. The only thing I think anyone should be mindful of is what’s there, in front of or around them, wherever it is. That of course includes themselves as part of the scene or moment. A poem is essentially observation (of what is out there, but also observation of the self in the moment) plus inspiration.

Could you comment on the importance of tone in poetry? “Swan, Heron, Ducks” has a slow, contemplative tone which suits the subject, I think.

I think tone is very important, in any poem. Apart from the “idea” or thought that anchors the poem and the music of the poem, the rhythm, flow, etc. – what merges them together to create an overall effect is the tone – sometimes obvious, other times more subtle and hard to pin down: dry, warm, detached, ironic, superior, playful, sardonic, etc. Sometimes it’s hard for a writer to hear and identify the tone they have presented in their own poem, to hear what readers will get on a first hearing.

Music features quite a lot in your poetry. What role would you say it plays in your writing?

Yes, continuing on from the previous question, for me it’s not enough to just have a good idea, or perception, or witness something and think “that would make a good poem” – and just write it down. In that case the only thing the reader/listener can respond to is the quality of the idea, or perception. If you’re reliant solely on how good the thought is, then it had better be exceptional, unusual, at least worth drawing attention to. But even a low key, quiet or understated thought or idea can have a powerful effect when combined with the form of the poem, the rhythm, structure, flow – in other words the “music”. Imagine a collection where you have to come up with 50 great ideas or perceptions! Even the major writers don’t achieve this. But attention to form and structure – the music of the poem can give a whole collection a sense of cohesion and ensure at least some “delight” with every piece – which is what Frost said he was looking for first in a poem. (He said a poem should begin with delight and end in wisdom, not the other way around.)

Another striking feature of this poem is the use of run-on lines (or “enjambment” if we’re gonna get technical about it). Did you use this technique in order to reflect anything in the poem, or simply because it felt right?

We talk about rhythm in poetry, and it’s easy to hear it in obvious cases like marching feet, or a train – but what is the “rhythm” of a gently flowing stream, or an almost still pond? Perhaps here it’s more helpful to think of ‘flow’ – in which case yes, the flow of the lines one into the next is important in capturing the soundscape or music of the scene. This poem is also a bit like a play, there are characters taking part in a low key dramatic scene, there is action and there is stillness. All the characters get a moment where the attention is on them, but they form an ensemble, a collective presence. Each has a voice and quality of action that is distinct to them. So, overall, although the poem is focused on a stillness (the title is the way you might describe a “still life” in visual art), it still has to move.

Why do you write?

I love words, ideas, feelings, perceptions, sounds – and how these come together in ways that surprise even the writer. I love how when you’re writing, things happen by accident. In this poem I clearly had thoughts about music buzzing round in my head, when the swan expanded then contracted its wings I saw an accordion. It surprised me. I didn’t bring that perception to the poem, it just happened. Even in a small way, the result is the world has changed in how you perceive and experience it.

If you had one piece of advice for a writer, what would it be?

Trust your thoughts and feelings. Write it! You can worry about it later.

3 Comments

#19 "Love's Education" by Colin Dardis

15/5/2016

Introduction
The title of this poem strikes me as similar to that of a metaphysical poet. Indeed, John Donne has a poem called “Love’s Alchemy”. I think this connotation affected my reading of the poem first time round. I’d say the first verse holds onto these features even on repeated readings, but the verses that follow it break free from the restraints of such connections.

Building a poem around a sustained metaphor can be a very fulfilling experience for the reader, but when done clumsily, it can be a wearying experience. Mixed in with the mathematical language, Colin Dardis treats the reader to startlingly original and surprising phrases such as “defrost your knowledge”. All of this is delivered in an interesting tone, one you might call clinical.

Behind this clinical tone, there lies very raw subject matter. Love and death tend to attract this kind of distant tone, I think, as tackling them head-on can often feel bland and boring. Maybe it’s because we all relate to such feelings so easily that the language needs to be slightly difficult or unusual in order to hold the reader’s interest. Essentially, this poem boils down to very familiar concept, though one which is dealt with in an interesting way, which is what poetry, maybe more than any other art form, should seek to do. It’s the idea that we can’t plan too much, that we need to feel the flow and go with it.

Love’s Education
Love’s education is a paltry affair,
full of half-remembered paradigms,
useless ratios and uneven balance.

People will come to defy your lessons,
defrost your knowledge
and mix the fluids with their drink,

spiked with new measurements;
the approach of a stranger
demanding you revise the recipe.

Life demands the constant role
of student, in a world so ignorant,
you rarely get to play at teacher.

Others will pass on your ungraded heart,
not seeing the value of results,
only the stamp of failure

ingrained into your features.
Scrap your homework, tear up your notebooks,
the rules are asking to be rewritten.

About Colin
I dread people asking me what I do; basically anything you can think of that involves poetry, I try. A worse question is: so what kind of poetry do you write? I’ve yet to find a satisfactory answer to this.

Northern Ireland is a very small place. I would say most poets here know each other, or at least know of each other, thanks to social media. There are not many platforms or outlets for poetry here outside of academia. I founded Poetry NI because I know of so much literary talent in ‘our wee country’ and feel it simply deserves to be put out there. Open mic nights, readings, workshops, print and online publishing, charity and school work – it all ties into strengthening the community of poets in Northern Ireland. I love being a part of it, and I don’t think I would be much of a poet without it.

My work has been published in various places throughout Ireland, the UK and the USA. A long period of depression held me back in my writing and career, but as I near my forties, I’m beginning to re-emerge.

Interview
Your poem seems to suggest that no-one can become an expert in love, no matter how vast their experience. Is the same true of writing, or is there more scope for becoming what some might call an “expert”?

I’m not sure if the poem does suggest that; it ends on a note of defiance and hope, to write your own rules. In poetry, perhaps it is the same. You can only write in your voice, and it will take years to get there. I’m tempted to go with Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule, “the magic number of greatness”, the amount of time needed to become a genius or outstanding. So you spend 10,000 hours reading, writing, listening, studying, crafting, redrafting, etc. That might get you there. Although what is an expert? Some might perceive it as someone who is knowledgeable; others judge it on success. I’ve no desire to be an expert, I just want to write something true and beautiful.

Specifically, can poetry be taught?

Language can be taught. Grammar, technique, terms, examples, the difference between a metaphor and a simile, all of this can be taught. It’s up to the individual to take all these component parts and make it into the sum of poetry.

What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages of stretching a metaphor across a poem, as you have done here? What would you advise when attempting this approach?

It’s tricky, and I can show you many, many unsuccessful attempts at it! I like a poem to be a focused piece, and when drafting, I tend to overwrite, to exhaust the subject almost and see what works and what doesn’t. I can only really do that by staying on point. When you mix images or metaphors, the message can get muddled. But you also risk boring the reader: “okay, okay, you’ve made your point already!”. My advice: watch out for repetition and summary. Often, you’ve already said what you need to say. Know where to end the poem. In “Love’s Education”, I use the last two lines to go against everything that’s been said so far. It felt like a natural ending, in that the defiance didn’t need to be explained. It was enough that the act was there.

Was the phrase “defrost your knowledge” there in the first draft, or did you have a less interesting verb there that you decided needed to be improved? Tell us about how you came to use the phrase, and the role of such unusual phrases in poetry.

The poem is coming from the point of view of someone who has been hurt. And of course, if you’ve been hurt in love, there’s a danger you can turn cold. You can turn off your feelings in order to protect yourself out of the fear of repeating past experiences. There’s nothing new or startling there. So I wanted a more original, more quirky way of saying that. It was there in the first draft, certainly. Sometimes a phrase forms almost unconsciously in a blink (Gladwell again), and you just find that it works. Poetry is hard to explain like that. That’s where the instinctiveness comes in, I guess, perhaps that thing that can’t be taught, only reached through endurance.

Unusual phrases in poetry? Unusual phrases are poetry. Or should I say, there can be poetry. “Metastasized electromagnetic radiation disseminated by suspended water particles” is perhaps an unusual way of saying “the sun was behind a cloud”, but it’s pretty clumsy as poetry goes. The trick is to not overcomplicate matters and be on high alert for clichés and overused, stock phrases.

Why do you write?

I would like to get away with quoting Dan Eggs: “Because I’m good at it”. However, I’m bad plenty of the time. I write to try to make sense of things: poetry is a form of analysis. Or I write because I feel something is worth recording. I don’t keep a diary, but my poetry tracks a lot of my life for me.

If you had one piece of advice for a writer, what would it be?

Read.

5 Comments

#18 "The Display" by Stephanie Conn

1/5/2016

2 Comments

Introduction
Poetry as an art form, it often seems to me, is ideal at blending the abstract parts of storytelling with vivid imagery. This poem is a perfect example. We get a series of memorable images connected by pieces of narrative. Perhaps the most striking image comes in the last line: “Today I mapped a cello in the sky”.

There may be an even more profound connection behind this poem, though. Stephanie Conn presents us with the sheer power of childhood imagination, to the point that it almost takes the breath away. And this fascination transfers to the reader, drawing a link between childhood and creativity (even if not explicitly intended by the writer). Is it this link to childhood imagination that compels poets to write?

Okay, that’s just speculation. Much like the speculation involved in recognising shapes and characters among the random pinpricks of stars in the sky. The mapping of constellations is just one of the many in-built metaphors we inherit from society at a young age, like figures of speech. To be a child, or a person in general, means to be constantly seeking connections. This poem provides them in abundance.

The Display
We drew them in daylight,
plotted stars on black paper
to the sound of pencils being sharpened
and boys whispering by the bin.

We connected the dots in white chalk
to see, more clearly, the shapes they made,
watched the outline become a rainbow,
as layer after layer, left behind
tiny mounds of coloured dust.

Yesterday we talked of stories in the sky,
learned how to spell con-stell-ation,
how a winged horse and a hunter’s dog
hide above our heads until we sleep.

I read in a book that chalk is formed
from the skeletons of sea creatures
how things we’ve never seen can become
something else entirely in our hands.
Today I mapped a cello in the sky.

(The Woman on the Other Side, published by Doire Press. Available here: http://www.doirepress.com/writers/m_z/stephanie_conn/)

About Stephanie
I was born in County Down in Northern Ireland in 1976 and now live in County Antrim with my husband and two daughters. A graduate of Stranmillis University College, I worked as a primary school teacher and developed and taught the literacy programme Passport to Poetry. In 2013, I graduated with a Creative Writing M.A. from the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queens University, Belfast.

In 2012, I was shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Award and highly commended in the Doire Press Poetry Chapbook and Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Competitions. The following year I was shortlisted in the Red Line Poetry Competition and had my work selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series. In 2014, I was highly commended in the Fool for Poetry Chapbook competition and won the Translink Haiku Competition. In 2015, I came third in the Dromineer Poetry Competition, was highly commended in Gregory O’Dononoghue Competition and was awarded the Funeral Services N.I. Poetry Prize, the Yeovil Poetry Prize and the inaugural Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing.

My debut collection, The Woman on the Other Side, was published in March 2016 by Doire Press. I am currently working on my second collection, inspired by the lives of my ancestors who lived and worked on Copeland Island, which is now uninhabited.

Interview
What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages of writing about childhood experiences? In particular, is there anything a writer should be wary of when writing about childhood?

“The Display” was actually inspired by an experience I had as a primary school teacher. It is written from the perspective of a child as this worked best for the poem. There are very few poems in the collection about childhood.

I’m currently working on my second collection and there are more poems written from a child’s perspective – while these are not my own childhood experiences, the child’s voice lends itself to a special kind of wonder and a unique way of viewing the world that adults sometimes lose. Children often live in a world of the senses. A child’s natural curiosity, their ease with questioning, their ability to be still, to be fully present in the moment and to see things with a clear, unbiased eye are the very things I try to capture, or indeed recapture, as a poet.

A poem written from a child’s perspective also allows tension to build – presenting viewpoints at odds with adults, the world around them, societal norms.

My poems are informed by my life experiences but they are rarely records of, or direct references to that life. Feeling the need to stick to the exact facts of an experience can be limiting – twisting a truth will often serve the poem better. As with any poem, the particular details, the images and the language used must all earn their place.

Humans tend to look for patterns, and sometimes see them when they simply aren’t there (as with some visual illusions). Why do you think that is (or would you disagree?), and does such pattern-seeking have any significance in relation to writing?

Trying to impose an order is what we do. Often, we live in the mind and try to make sense of the craziness that is life. We search for meaning in all sorts of ways – some readily accepted, others less so. When we hurt or feel overwhelmed by what life throws at us, when we feel a lack of control over our own lives, we search for reasons.

In my poem “Signs and Superstitions” I consider this.

       I spotted the Plough and the Bear, and wondered why
       we search for comfort in the stars, when down below
       the earth offers up her well-trodden lanes and roads
       and we know those who have seen it all before…

The poem finishes:

       For days I gathered feathers wherever they could be found,
       no doubt from quilts or pillows or from a passing bird.
       I looked both ways at crossings, waited for the sound
       of crashing glass, avoided cats and ladders, absurd
       I know, a pagan prayer of sorts, I jumped the cracks,
       crossed my fingers and scattered the jacks.

For me, writing certainly has something to do with patterns. I don’t see it as pattern seeking – rather pattern forming – in making connections, creating patterns, revealing patterns – even in free forms, there are links between words, sounds, images and ideas.

In a way, poetry can be like astronomy – creating images from separate points that are not usually connected. Do you think there are any fundamental links between science and creative arts?

I do. Both science and poetry deal in close observation of the particular. Patterns emerge and unexpected connections reveal themselves as we question and delve into the uncertainties of life. Both try to make sense of the world and of our place in it.

This poem is taken from your first collection The Woman on the Other Side, published this year by Doire Press. Can you tell us firstly about where you placed this poem in the collection, and why? Can you also tell us a little bit about your process of selection and structuring in relation to the collection?

“The Display” appears about three-quarters of the way through the collection, alongside poems containing images from the heavens – the sun, moon, planets, comets, stars – and our relationship to them. Poems that consider how we make sense of our lives – our beliefs, suspicions, rituals.

The first collection developed one poem at a time. One piece led to another and sequences emerged, such as poems inspired by the life of Russian poet, Marina Tsvetayeva and a set of ekphrastic poems. There are pieces set in the Netherlands and others in Australia. The reader is taken on a geographical journey but it is the emotional landscape I am most concerned with. The notion of who we are ‘on the other side’ of our experiences and our relationships.

In many ways the poems ordered themselves – there seemed to be a natural trajectory when looking at the work as a whole. I moved a few pieces around when there seemed to be a better fit and dropped work that felt out of place.

I am currently working on my second collection which starts with a particular focus and writing it has been a very different process.

Why do you write?

I write to make sense of the world; to create order out of chaos. I love to see experience, feeling, confusion even, take form. I also write to question, to discover, to be surprised.
Writing allows me to initiate conversations that cannot take place in reality.

If you had one piece of advice for a writer, what would it be?

You are the only person with your particular experiences and your responses to them.
You are the only with your voice – believe in that.

2 Comments

#17 "Reading the Omens" by Flish McCarthy

15/4/2016

Introduction
Dramatic openings aren’t used enough in poetry. Okay, it’s difficult to pull off, I know. But see how Flish McCarthy does it here. The first line gives no indication of what’s to come, leaving the reader intrigued. We read on, and a scene unfurls like wings from a cocoon.

What I really like about this poem is its seamless weaving of tones. Again, variety of tone is often underused in poetry, I think, but it’s practised with skill here. Following that dramatic entrance are two more descriptive and poetic verses. For the fourth verse, the speaker becomes that bit more reflective, even wistful. Finally, the poem’s coffin is nailed down with a very frank conclusion.

And yet the reader is left with a question (or at least this reader was): are the omens referred to in the title related to death in general or to something more specific? Check out the very thoughtful video for the poem at the bottom of the page, directed by Micheál Reidy (www.MDGD.ie).

Reading the Omens
A chorus of voices called, No!
when I reached for the latch.
Don’t let her out, she’ll die.

A monarch hatched from the rafters.
Her orange and black wings a mirror
to the hot coals that waked her.

A trail of twisted cobweb sported flies
as if it were a kite tail tied with bows
and she ready to be launched to the sky.

Though we turned away,
she is with me still, as
I plan for the days ahead.

Take this as written:
when my time comes,
to hatch from this body

I want you to open the window.

About Flish
I am a poet and healer living in Salthill. In recent years, I have been published in Java Writers’ Infusions, GUH’s This Never Happened II, BoyneBerries 18, RNLI’s Anthology The Sea, and was also shortlisted for the 2015 Baillieborough Poetry Prize. In December 2015, I was a featured writer for Over the Edge Open Reading.

I studied English Language and Lit in a single honours program at TCD while raising four kids and working various jobs. I was a bartender in The Buttery Bar, the creator/manager of the Student Union bookstore that is still running as a business in 2016, and a founder member of the Finbar Cullen Co-op, TCD’s first alternative, political cafe. My life has been and is a roller coaster adventure, and I am learning to lean into the turns.

Interview
You’ve chosen a kind of oblique, unstraightforward approach to writing a poem about releasing a butterfly here. Can you tell us why/how you came to choose this approach?

I was quite struck when this incident happened. A number of poets gathered for the weekend last winter to write. That cottage was the setting for the poem. Long after I had returned home, I could not get the butterfly out of my mind. I wasn’t sure why it was important, but I knew that if I stayed with the image, let it keep annoying me, I would learn something. To do that, I needed to write about it. As I wrote, I began to understand why releasing the butterfly mattered.

So often, my poems are born out of my need to understand things that happen; things I have read, seen or experienced; in turn, these often hold a deeper, more personal meaning. Something strikes me and I think to myself, there’s a poem in there.

Yeats remarked that we make poetry out of the quarrel we are having with ourselves. This was one of those quarrels. Why did this butterfly bother me so much? I wrote until I understood that as I face the inevitable ending of my own life, I want to do it on my own terms.

As with many good endings, the last line here seems fairly ambiguous and hard to pin down 100%. Can you tell us whether opening the window, for you, refers to something specific or something more broad?

Both. The window represents the opportunity to live according to one’s own wishes, with the hard knowledge that a quicker death might be the result. Opening the window is giving the butterfly the choice. The butterfly is standing in for all mortals, but particularly for me. We don’t have a choice about dying; however, we sometimes have a choice about what we want to do before we die, and/or how we want to die.

I have said to my adult children that this is my DNR directive (Do Not Resuscitate) in a poetic form. I do not wish to die slowly in a hospital if there is a chance that I might enjoy a last flight surrounded by the beauty of this planet.

It seems that the butterfly’s fragility has reminded you/the speaker of his/her own fragility. Does fragility have a role to play in writing, do you think?

It is the fragility, or what I would call the ephemeral nature of life, that intrigues me. I believe this is the essential argument at the heart of much of the world’s literature. As writers we attempt to make sense of the fact that life, with all its beauty, must end.

This could be described as a nature poem. When some people hear those words, “nature poem”, they yawn, expecting something boring. How do you feel about nature poetry, yourself?

Some poems that might be labelled nature poems are great poems, for example: Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese, Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck, or Naomi Shihab Nye’s Kindness.

The natural world is a resource and inspiration to me and my writing. I was born into a house that overlooked Lake Erie, so my ears are tuned to the rhythm and sound of moving water. The house was bounded by fields of tall grasses with tiny wild strawberries hiding beneath that only a small child might find. This grounding allowed me to feel at home in the natural world; with all that is beautiful, surprising, and constantly changing. I might say I fell in love with the earth as a child.

I was a teenager when the first photos of the earth hanging like a blue and green jewel in black space, embraced by a shawl of swirling cloud, were released by NASA. At that moment, the beauty and fragility of the planet came together and I was awestruck. Like many of my generation, I never got over it.

To love earth and write about it during this, one of its most trying times, is one way to become responsible to it and for it.

Why do you write?

I write to learn more about who I am, and what I care most deeply about. I write because it makes me happy to be writing.

If you had one piece of advice for a writer, what would it be?

Read everything; poetry modern and old, metered and free, slam and spoken word, local and global, poetry in your own language and in translation. Taste the words on your tongue. Use your voice and your ears. Also read everything that piques your interest. Follow your curiosity until it is satisfied. These things will show up in your work and make it particularly yours.

Next, understand yourself well enough to know the ways that wake you up to the world and what produces your best work. Then make sure you do those things. It is your opportunity, as Heaney says, to “Strike your note.”

Don’t miss it.

6 Comments

#16 "Just Desserts" by Mary Coll

1/4/2016

2 Comments

Introduction
Isn’t sarcasm great? It’s not a tone we see often in poetry, beyond the genre of satire. Here, Mary Coll blends it into her poem in just the right measure, I think. It’s one of those snapshot poems that fling a bunch of images and ideas in front of the reader like old photographs, and yet it doesn’t rely heavily on these, but more on the general sense of the relationship between the two characters.

What’s also interesting here is the use of historical/background detail, playing on the reader’s knowledge of Marie Antoinette in a comical way. So playful is the speaker in this poem that I’m wondering if “Just Desserts” is ambiguous – also implying a sense of “they’re only desserts – chill out”.

Maybe the Parisian setting has something to do with it, but I get a whiff of Oscar Wilde in this poem. There’s a lot of irony at play, a lot of neat logic tied with the ribbon of wit. I could imagine him describing pastry as “impeccable”, too. Of course, Wilde got his just desserts, in some people’s eyes. And he, too, wallowed in the sensual, just as this poem invites us to do. He highlighted the ridiculous. And so do these lines. Who needs three cakes? Indeed.

Just Desserts
In the café around the corner from where Marie Antoinette lost her head,
you also lose yours over a cake.
At home, you inform me, we could have three for the price of a slice here.
But we are not at home now, my dear,
we are in Paris,
at least, one of us is,
and besides, who needs three cakes anyway.
You flick through the guidebook, eager to narrate us on our way again, determined not to miss a trick, but then you do.
At the next table the man in the pale grey suit with the mauve silk tie,
lifts a forkful of impeccable pastry towards the lips of a girl half his age,
his hand perfectly poised before them,
and they open to him, for the umpteenth time that day,
while he smiles the smile of one who knows the real pleasure
of having his cake, and eating it.

About Mary
I’m a writer from Limerick city, who has worked in the arts most of my professional life. As well as poetry I write plays which have been produced on stage and on the radio, and essays which have mainly been broadcast on a variety of Irish radio programmes. I’ve also worked as a freelance theatre and visual arts critic for radio, televison and some Irish national newspapers, and I’ve contributed to a variety of radio programmes as a panellist, and also as a presenter. I like to talk, and I like to write, and I think my voice is the same in all formats, that is, I hope I remain true to myself across all of my work. Salmon Poetry published my first collection of poems, called All Things Considered, and Arlen House is going to publish my next collection, entitled Silver, in 2016. I also have a commission for a new play which I’m working on, when I’m not on Facebook or randomly Googling things to distract me from what I should be doing. You can probably Google everything you need to know about me. I know the photos of my last really dodgy short haircut are out there, and my obituary (if you get the wrong Mary Coll) but it won’t tell you really important things like my dog’s name (Arlo) or my favourite poets (Elaine Feinstein, Billy Collins and Louise Gluck) or that I sing in a really serious choir but can’t play an instrument or sight-read music, and that my secret ambition is to win The Great British Bake Off, although I don’t bake, and that I am afraid of flying. These things are revealed only through my writing…..

Interview
Your poem seems to depict a relationship gone sour, or at least a sour moment from a relationship. (The wit with which you deal with it is what makes the poem, I think.) In terms of writing about relationships, would you say it’s easier to write about the negative or the positive?

I write in the moment, I think that my poems are like snapshots of moments in my life. “Just Deserts” tries to capture how I was feeling on a day when I was walking around Paris with my husband, his eagerness to see everything in the guide book, whereas I just wanted to sit at a table in a café and watch the world go by. The relationship was anything but sour, then or now. We are just very different people, and different people can be in the same moment in very different ways. He experiences the world in a very immediate way, whereas I’m always processing things in my head and narrating stories about what is going on around me. I like to observe, he likes to engage, and it is out of that contradiction that I write. I don’t see it as negative or positive, it is just two people coming at the same thing in very different ways. Paris in my head is and was an entirely different place to his Paris, and out of recognising that came a poem.

It’s interesting how you’ve weaved common knowledge of Marie Antoinette into this poem. It’s almost a kind of intertextuality, but the text referenced here is one we’ve encountered through our memory of history books and the like. How do you think such referencing/intertextuality can help in the writing/enjoyment of poetry (or writing in general)?

I honestly didn’t give it that level of deep thought or consideration, I wasn’t trying that hard, the reference just fell into place for me in the first draft that I wrote. We were sitting outside a café near where Marie Antoinette was executed when the discussion about the price of the pastry took place, and the link in my head to her infamous comment “Let them eat cake” was inevitable in that context. Perhaps references like that make poems more accessible, but I don’t think what I write is inaccessible in the first place, at least I hope its not.

Can you tell us about any differences between writing at home and writing in foreign places?

Air conditioning and excellent local wine, these certainly help a great deal, and of course there is more time for pondering and gazing! I write at my desk at home, and I keep a notebook with me when I’m away, so in the end all of my writing, as in the completion of work, happens in the same place, the rest is note taking and observation and jotting things down.

Above all, this is a witty poem. It made me laugh at several points. Do you think wit/humour has much of a role to play in poetry, and should it be used more often?

I find it hard to stay serious for too long about anything, as you’ve noticed, and as I said earlier I like to stay true to myself, to my voice, in my work, so my sense of humour and of the absurd comes through, because that is how I am in the world.

Why do you write?

I have always been writing, as long as I can remember, poems, letters, essays, notes, texts, emails, status updates, that is who and how I am. I am writing my way through my life and I have no idea why, but then musicians have to play music and artists have to paint, and I don’t think they can explain it either, it is just how I was hardwired. I make sense of things for myself by writing and I can trace my path back through my life in my own words, and words are the stepping stones I use to move forward.

If you had one piece of advice for a writer, what would it be?

Find your voice, it takes a long time to hear it, and you have to listen very carefully. Don’t be distracted by other voices, and don’t take this sort of advice too seriously!

2 Comments

#15 "For Me It Was The Trees" by Michael Mark

15/3/2016

18 Comments

Introduction
Poetry often looks to the less obvious, the forgotten, meek things. This is what Michael Mark does here. He glides past the more obvious subjects of elephants, jackals and vultures, making a beeline for trees that stand like dumb monuments which can’t defend themselves.

Likewise, the speaker of the poem is powerless. But he/she is crippled by fear, not by his/her physical nature. It’s this fear that haunts him/her when he/she returns home. It’s the haunting that we all experience from actions we didn’t take in life.

It can be hard to fit rhetorical questions into poems well, but Michael manages a question that slips in nicely, relatively unnoticed, like all the best rhetorical questions. Unnoticed like trees, you could say. Trees are around us all our lives. Even those who live in the concrete oases of cities usually encounter/see a tree nearly every day. They’re like bones rising up from the earth. We all have skinned trees somewhere in the back of our minds.

For Me it was the Trees
Stripped to their sap
by rhinos needing to scratch an itch,
dismembered by elephants
marking their existence,
left leafless by the insane baboons.

Broken and more beautiful,
they stood in defiance of death,
undeniably dead.

Even more than the too-close nightly roars
that shook our tent and made me leak pee,
then worry until light
that whatever predators were out there
would pick up the scent
and track it to us,

beyond the three giraffes
in a solemn row,
watching the jackals, hyenas and
cloud of vultures eating
the remains of their fallen elder,

it was the trees
that impressed me most
on our summer vacation.

Monuments to nothing I can name.
Were they even trees anymore?

From the crowded plane home,
I saw the skeleton sculptures
waving their tangled arms, frail,
skinless fingers clawing at the vastness
and me, not to forget.

In my bed, haunted.

I should have gotten out of the jeep.
I should have walked over to one of them
and sat down like Buddha.

About Michael
I’m a hospice volunteer and long-distance walker, gardener, husband, son, brother, father, former business owner, misser of our dogs. I have written two books of stories, Toba and At the Hands of a Thief (Atheneum). I’ve been writing poetry for three years; some have appeared or are forthcoming in Gargoyle Magazine, Paterson Literary Review, Poet Lore, Prelude, Rattle, Spillway, The Sow’s Ear, Sugar House Review, and Tar River Poetry. My poems have been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and the 2016 Best of the Net. michaeljmark.com.

Interview
Fear seems to have a major role in this poem. Do you think fear has much of an influence on your writing, and on writing in general?

Busted! Fear has been a driver in my life, my little friend. Guess it happens when you believe in everything. On my desk now is Edward Hirsch’s book Wild Gratitude. His poem “Commuters” is a stirring example of everyday fear which he struggles to name: “It’s the vague feeling of panic/ That sweeps over you/ Stepping out of the #7 train”. He feels it, he knows where it happens, but he can’t name it. Fear is like that for me. I use writing as an investigative tool. In this poem, it’s confessional, journalistic as well. It’s set in a place where I don’t know the rules, where I’m vulnerable and physically at risk (my wife and I are sleeping in tents, needing armed people to protect us, shaken by the roars), so, yes, I feel threatened. And then, as I examine the poem through the lens of fear, even in my own bed, I regret not acting instinctively, intuitively, like the animals, I suppose. I see fear’s fingerprints on the scene; that this inaction could continue in my normal life, when I get home, and I’d be too much of a spectator. Interestingly, in the plane, where I have the least control, there’s no fear. Fear is one of my top writing stimulants; it’s also an effective alarm that goes off when drama’s near. And, of course, I head towards it, on tippy-toes.

Similarly, focusing on things that are usually less well-noticed is prominent here. Does this act have any significance in terms of your writing?

Well, that’s tricky. It’s always been an issue with me. “Michael, stop looking over there – the blackboard is here, the ball is here, cars are coming!” Even in college, my papers would return with notes from the professors commenting that, while I missed the main point, what I featured was interesting and sometimes insightful. This always surprised me, since I wanted to follow the rules, just couldn’t. So what is obvious to others I often miss, and what I see rather plainly might be overlooked or disregarded by others. That’s a good reason to read and use a GPS. In this poem, you caught the pride coming through from the title and the shame in the end. I do believe in the power of the hidden in the obvious: William Carlos Williams’s The Red Wheelbarrow teaches us that, as do those often overlooked white chickens who squawk about not getting in the title.

Even before you mentioned Buddha in the last line, I got a sense of religion or spiritualism from the scene playing out before the speaker (the animals feeding, etc.). The idea of sitting down like Buddha is a fearless one (assuming the feasting animals are nearby), so I’m wondering if you wanted to convey any connection between religion and fear here.

Yes, exactly. Africa is said to be a spiritual place, but, of course, no more than the local gas station, the shopping mall, butcher shop. When we really see, connect, we experience a charge. By that, I mean life (easier to do when witnessing an older giraffe being consumed by other animals as the fallen giraffe’s family stands in reverence). We are awakened to our place, our role in a bigger plot, time, interconnectivity. The stuff we don’t see or feel everyday for many good reasons, like stop signs. But when we do, we are in touch with being, its glory and its mundane chores. So the idea of Buddha sitting under a tree in Africa with wildness all around does touch on religion, bravery, hunger; it’s a romantic image. In this poem the narrator is connected to his spirituality (paying homage to the tree – its spirit), his desire for something beyond a tourist’s experience and his fear of being food. The three are tightly wound in hopes of making an image that vibrates.

Your question “Were they even trees anymore?” implies the possibility of a whole identity changing due to a physical change or an event. Are significant changes such as a change of identity relevant to writing and reading poetry, do you think? In other words, can/does poetry change us, and has it changed you in a very significant way?

What makes a thing that thing is of great interest to me. Africa was a stunning stage to play it out, as it seems all is even more fluid there, changing so quickly we can’t accurately know and name it. So, in one moment, you come across an animal which we identify as “leopard” who has cubs, who they would call “mother,” and is, therefore, a “protector” and a “hunter,” and is “prey” – all visable against the starkness – and so, being all these, she becomes a blur. Same with the trees: wood, shelter, shade, fire, weapon, food, back-scratcher – all, fully, simultaneously. I think it’s fair to say seeing the blur is seeing in focus. Poetry, for me, (and I reserve the right for it to change), is like a super fast shutter in a camera a tourist brings along to catch glimpses of what is going on as it happens, click by click, and then, later prints them out and sees what they nearly saw. Poetry defies time, slows it down to show something vividly enough that the reader is moved, you could say changed, and also gives them a moment to re-recognize themselves.

Why do you write?

I was a poor student; “slow” was the term. Writing was the one thing in the classroom I was most consistently praised for. I write to see and live deeply, to make sure I don’t miss the miracles. Of course, I would very much like my writing to add value to people’s lives the way so many writers have added to mine.

If you had one piece of advice for a writer, what would it be?

Write. Fall in love with the process of writing. Rejoice when you’ve written well. Rewrite.

18 Comments

#14 "Ruminations on the Plum" by Gail Dendy

1/3/2016