Verbal Magazine

An Exploded View

Who, or what, first sparked your interest in poetry?

I wrote my first poems when I was sixteen, but it wasn’t until I went to Trinity College Dublin that poetry grew into the central obsession of my life. Some time in my early undergraduate days I started to envisage the possibility of being a poet. I’d have been eighteen or nineteen.

Who are your favourite poets and do you have a favourite poem?

I have quite a few favourite poets: Yeats, Auden, Louis MacNeice, Patrick Kavanagh, Philip Larkin, Keith Douglas, W.S. Graham, George Herbert, Keats, Thomas Hardy, Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas. This year I have discovered a wonderful American poet I’d never heard of, Ruth Stone. She is 93 and still writing. I nominate ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ as my favourite poem. But this time next year that could well change. A poem by Edward Thomas called ‘Tall Nettles’ also means everything to me.

What is the state of modern poetry? Is it healthier in Ireland than elsewhere?

Since the beginning of time people have been saying that poetry ain’t what it used to be. Despite the moaners, I would claim that the 20th century was the finest there has been so far for poetry. The Noughties are pretty good too. Just think of Heaney, Mahon, Muldoon for starters. And here among us now there are some bracing younger talents: Leontia Flynn, Sinead Morrissey, Leanne O’Sullivan. I don’t know enough to compare Irish poetry with what is happening elsewhere. Irish poetry certainly has strengths - technical enterprise, shapeliness, the singing line - which must have something to do with Irish poets remembering and celebrating the fact that poetry’s tap-roots are in story and song.

What needs to be done to bring poetry to a wider audience?

Has poetry ever had a big audience? Does it matter? Yes, the audience does matter (but not the size of the audience). I don’t think any art form can prosper if it loses its ‘lay’ audience. The man and the woman in the street are not fools. Some of them will always rise to the challenge if they sense that a poet (or any other artist) is writing as well as he or she possibly can, courageously and honestly. But we live in distracting times when celebrity and vulgarity grab the headlines. Poetry demands a certain quietude and inwardness. So the audience is likely to be small. It has to be small.

Your poems tend towards brevity rather than length, have you ever been tempted to write an epic of your own, a la The Odyssey?

I strive for lyric intensity. I dislike chattiness and discursiveness in poetry. In a good poem every word works for its place. Poetry is to prose what whiskey is to beer; or what diamonds are to coal. The beauty and the power of poetry depend on concentration. I have said elsewhere that if prose is a river, then poetry is a fountain – free-flowing but shapely.

As a casual reader of poetry, I find shorter poems are invariably more effective in garnering an emotional response, why would you say this is?

In true poetry the meaning and the music are inseparable. A poem is the only way there is of saying what is being said. It is not paraphrasable. Remembering it by heart is the best (if not the only) way of absorbing its import. Poetry is memorable speech, someone said. Somebody else described a poem as a little machine for remembering itself – little perhaps, but infinitely powerful – immortal in its way.

There’s a powerful attempt to engage with violence within some of your poetry – from the Troubles to the wartime experiences of your father and soldiers like him - is this a conscious choice or do your subjects suggest themselves?

My subjects suggest themselves to me, nearly always. I don’t think I’ve ever said to myself: “I must write a poem about this.” But I do believe that poetry is about all of the things that happen to people – and that includes war and violence, unfortunately. But if I had not been able to write about the Troubles (and the World Wars), I don’t think that would have made me a bad poet. Emily Dickinson, one of the greatest poets of all time, lived and wrote through the American Civil War without mentioning it once. Edward Thomas who was killed at the Battle of Arras in 1917 made this crucial statement: “Anything however small may make a poem. Nothing however great is certain to.” In his wonderful poems addressed to a mouse or a daisy Robert Burns says far more about the mysteries of life than tens of thousands of crappy poems about Vietnam or the Troubles or Iraq. In fact the crappy poems say absolutely nothing. They’re worthless.

Are there any difficulties attached to writing about darker topics, like the Troubles?

A bad (published) poem about anything is a big enough offence, but a bad poem about the suffering of a fellow citizen is a sin against the light. You have to avoid at all costs impertinence, anything that smacks of voyeurism. You must never violate privacy or diminish anyone’s dignity. There’s been a lot of bad writing about our problems and tragedies. Shall we call it Troubles Trash? I published an elegy about a good man who was murdered while he worked in an ice-cream shop on the Lisburn Road. I called my poem ‘The Ice-cream Man’. A while after it was published his mother wrote to me and thanked me for remembering her son. She signed herself ‘The Ice-cream Man’s Mother’. That beautiful simple letter makes the whole enterprise, the last fifty years of tinkering with words, seem worthwhile.

You’re quite a private man and poetry can be a very confessional medium, did you, or do you ever, feel uncomfortable or exposed by your work?

At readings it is sometimes difficult to say private things in public. But if the poems are good, then they have a life of their own and they allow me to withdraw into the shadows, as it were. I don’t care for “confessional” poetry. Perhaps in these brazen times poetry should give sanctuary to old-fashioned and perfectly natural feelings of shyness and reserve.

Are you ever surprised by the connections or allusions people make and notice within your work?

Poems are mysterious things. I have no idea where they come from. I am not completely in control when I am writing a poem. If I was, I wouldn’t surprise myself (and that means I wouldn’t surprise anyone else). I like it if someone finds things I didn’t consciously put there. Perhaps it was the Muse!

When you left the NI Arts Council in 1991 it seemed to give your writing a new lease of life. Was that the intention, or merely a happy coincidence?

I stayed too long in my job at The Arts Council – twenty years. I really loved working with artists – a privilege – but the last five years weren’t much fun. Foolishly though unavoidably I got embroiled in what you might call “office politics”. I have a politician’s insights but not a politician’s temperament. I used to lie awake at 3 o’clock in the morning, tossing and turning and having arguments in my head with fuck-wits I wouldn’t normally cross the room to drink a sherry with. This poisoned the springs and I stopped writing poetry for eight years or so. I would have gone mad if I’d stayed on. So I got out – but not before I had slain a dragon or two. They were glad to get rid of me. Once I was free I started to notice the leaves on the trees and the birds singing – the sort of thing you stop registering when you are tense and worried and depressed. Birdsong and leafy trees brought the poetry back, and since leaving the Arts Council I have published four poetry collections. A fifth is on its way.

You’re 70 now, any thoughts of slowing down? Or is the compulsion to write too strong to allow you to retire!

I love the way two inimitable show-biz women have approached the subject of age. Lauren Bacall says of growing old: “It sure ain’t for cissies!” And the hilarious Joan Rivers suggests: “You don’t get any wiser – you just forget how stupid you are!” I have produced a little cluster of poems this month, and they sound new to me – fresh rhythms – a different sound – a renewal. I’m singing and dancing again. I’m just beginning to get the hang of things, dammit, so I have no intention of retiring now.

What was it about your peer group that created so many exceptional poets in that generation? (Yourself, Heaney etc.)

We were gifted and we worked hard. We were lucky too.

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