Interview with poet Shirley McClure

I was deeply saddened to hear of the death of the poet Shirley McClure. I was lucky enough to know her and interviewed her last year. In a tribute to her warmth and wit, I'm republishing the interview. My condolences her family and her many friends. Now go off and read her poems.

Hi Shirley and welcome to emergingwriter. I enjoyed the launch recently of your new poetry collection, Stone Dress and I devoured the book on the way home.

First question. How did you first get into poetry?

The poems I wrote as a child bear a strong metrical resemblance to the hymns we sang in St Patrick's Presbyterian church in Waterford. I think that was my most likely influence, although we did read, and hear poetry read aloud at home. My mother was a primary school teacher and made sure we read more than Enid Blyton. In return I gave her carefully bound editions of 'My Poems'. This is beginning to remind me of Billy Collins' 'The Lanyard'...

Billy Collins - The Lanyard.

Does the carefully bound edition of “My Poems” still survive?

Probably, I shall look.

Would you want to go back and read your childhood poems? Have you? I’m not sure I would. In my memory they are brilliant, but probably with my world weary eye now they would appear less shiny.

I found my old poems!

But I am more amused by these than anything.

Did you continue writing through adolescence and on to early adulthood? How did school affect that?

I continued writing whilst at school, devoured the poetry sections of English text books and wrote for the school magazine. Teachers encouraged my writing. A couple of friends tried putting my poems to music, strumming away on their guitars on summer afternoons by the school pond. (Winter afternoons on their dorm beds?) Leslie Dowdall came to our school in fifth year, and did me the honour of singing one of my poem/songs at a school concert. (Already we could see she was good).

In college I did English & Spanish, read a lot and still wrote a bit, but it all kind of fizzled out as the years went by, with a kind of small revival when I got to forty.

Do you remember your first published poem as an adult? 

Getting published is always a thrill! Although one of my poems appeared in our college magazine, Icarus(1982), and a translation of mine from Spanish to English showed up in Poetry Ireland Review, I think I was most excited when in 1992, after a long 'sleep', one of my poems was selected to appear in Women's Work, an anthology of poems brought out by a Wexford-based community arts group. We were invited to read our poems, and my partner and I went to Wexford for the night. There I tasted the thrill of reading 'live', a pleasure I rediscovered fifteen years later after another long pause in my writing career. I remember the night so well, and the excitement of meeting other women who wrote. It makes me wonder why I stopped writing, or why I wrote so little really between the ages of 20 and 40. I suppose I was doing other things. Once I got into writing proper, I discovered the equally strong emotion of disappointment each time poems were rejected. Not funny.

So there’s hope for every lapsed writer! What brought you back into poetry, do you think?

A friend threw a 40^th birthday party for me, where people performed and sang. Very enjoyable, except that they had dug out a few of my old poems and these were read, to my deep embarrassment! It made me think, though, and soon afterwards I attended a weekend writing workshop which really inspired me. At another workshop I met James Conway, who runs Rathmines Writers' Workshop, a long-standing group which meets weekly. I joined the group and the challenge to produce a new poem every week got me going. I would encourage anybody who is starting out or re-starting to attend courses/workshops, and to join a group where you get helpful feedback. Since then I have always been part of a work-shopping group: I spent about 5 years each in Rathmines and then Airfield Writers, then set up a small peer group with my friend Jane Clarke and three others. The group keeps my focus whenever I lose it. We do 2 poems each and stick to a strictish half hour per person arrangement, after which we all need to go home!
How did your first poetry collection come about?

I was preparing my first manuscript to send out when I saw an ad for the Cork Literary Review/ Bradshaw Books manuscript competition. So I sent my collection,Whose Counting there and was very lucky to win in 2009. Tina Pisco was writer in residence at Tigh Fili/ Bradshaw Books at that time, and she and Maura Bradshaw were very encouraging to me in getting the book out. They got me down to Cork to do a few readings which was a big help.   

And what about your most recent collection?

Bradshaw Books encouraged me to move on as they prefer to publish new writers, so for my second collection I did have to decide where best to send my work. Again I was lucky in that Arlen House does not accept unsolicited manuscripts, but a fellow writer who knew my work suggested they have a look at it. Alan Hayes and I exchanged edited versions of the manuscript and met to agree on final changes. He pointed out that I am over-fond of italics, so I will watch out for that in future! Apart from that, we tended to be in agreement about the changes to be made, so it progressed quickly. The book was launched in Dublin in July, and I'll be taking it on tour from next week (Kilkenny on 27^th August) with Jane Clarke, who is promoting her new book, The River.

What do you have coming up?

Stone House Books, Kilkenny
The Kilkenny launch of Spanish Affair and Jane Clarke's The River is in Stone House Books on Thursday 27th August at 7pm. Music by Eamon Sweeney, whose Spanish guitar is featured on the CD Spanish Affair.

Café Fusion, Wexford
Shirley and Jane read at Café Fusion on Friday 4th September at 8pm.

Courthouse Arts Centre, Tinahely, Co. Wicklow
Shirley McClure, Jane Clarke, and classical guitarist, Eamon Sweeny, will give a performance of poetry and music on Thursday 24th September at 8.30pm.

Bray Arts, Bray
A performance of poetry and music from Spanish Affair with Eamon Sweeney, Katie Donovan, Jane Clarke, Lizzy Morrissey and Shirley McClure, Monday 5th October at the Martello Hotel, Strand Road, Bray. 8 pm.

No Alibis Bookshop, Belfast

Poet Paula Cunningham will launch Jane Clarke's The River & Shirley McClure's Stone Dress on Thursday, October 8th at 6.30 pm.

Imagine Festival, Waterford
A reading by Shirley McClure and Jane Clarke at Waterford Book Centre, as part of the Imagine Festival. 3 pm on Sunday 25th October.

Books Upstairs Cafe & Bookshop, Dublin

A reading by poets Paula Cunningham, Rosy Shepperd, Jane Clarke & Shirley McClure on Thursday 26th November at 7 pm.

Thanks Shirley. Good luck with your upcoming readings with Jane. Here’s a poem from Shirley’s second collection, Stone Dress published by Arlen House, available to buy online from Kenny’s bookshop.

Groomed

Today she has been clipped, primped, squeezed,

handed back with a pink bow, she's a smooth black angel

beneath whose sleek chops, butter wouldn't melt.

Tonight is warm, the garden wild with possibility.

Suddenly the bellows of her belly surge, her body spasms

to expel the rare meat struggling in her mouth.

On the grass the hedgehog still breathes, but somehow

she has opened him, got right in without incurring

a single spine on her perfectly barbered snout.

Bio:
Shirley McClure's new collection, 'Stone Dress', is published by Arlen House in August 2015. Her CD Spanish Affair, with her own poems plus poetry and music from invited guests, was launched in June. All proceeds from the CD go to Arklow Cancer Support Group, where she facilitates a writers' group. Her first poetry collection, Who's Counting? (Bradshaw Books) won Cork Literary Review's Manuscript  Competition 2009. She won Listowel Writers' Week Originals Poetry Competition 2014. Shirley lives in Bray, Co. Wicklow. 
Shirley’s website is here: www.thepoetryvein.com

Interview with poet, critic and journalist Gerard Smyth

Hello Gerard and welcome to emergingwriter. Thanks for agreeing to be interviewed. The first question I am always curious how poets first got into poetry.

Poetry had its first stirrings in my life in a number of ways. I was a pre-Soundings schoolboy of the 1960s so the poets I encountered were mostly the English Romantics, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Matthew Arnold; also Shelley, Byron, Tennyson, a fair dose of Milton, and of course Shakespeare whose work even now continues to reveal itself in new ways. Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard had some claim on my heart. Yeats dominated the Irish side of things but we were also served up the 1916 poets, as well as other figures – Mangan, whose connection to my own Dublin locality appealed to me, also Ferguson, whose Lament for the death of Thomas Davis, was I think one of the prescribed poems, Padraic Colum,  James Stephens.

However, I think it was the soundscapes of Hopkins that particularly caught the attention of my ear, his way with words had a startling effect, it was exhilarating, of a different order to everyone else. Hopkins prepared me for Dylan Thomas who was certainly an influence on my own early efforts to the extent that one of the first critical comments on my apprentice poems picked out their technique as being “over indebted to that good poet but bad influence on young poets, Dylan Thomas”.

I was lucky to have an inspiring English teacher, Jack Hoey who simply radiated his love of language and made poetry “rise from the page”, as I described it years later in a poem in his memory.  I remain deeply grateful to him for making me aware of the value of poetry; his English classes had me enthralled – alas not the case with other subjects, except perhaps history.

Outside of school my poetry nurseries were two wonderful local libraries, Kevin Street and Thomas Street, where I was particularly drawn to the work of Dylan Thomas, the plays as well as the poems. I recall borrowing Under Milk Wood several times and wanting someday to write something like it.

But both libraries also had a good stock of the Dolmen editions and that was an introduction to the local contemporary scene, Austin Clarke, Montague , Pearse Hutchinson, but also Thomas Kinsella, whose influence on me would later override that of the Welsh poet. Very particularly I have never forgotten the detonation I experienced on first reading Kinsella’s Dick King – a poem set in the actual locale where I first read it and that was the eye-opening and liberating moment when poetry announced itself as something to be found on my own streets. Kinsella was significant in showing me (long before I tuned into Kavanagh ) how a poet should be earthed to his own place. I didn’t know it at the time but it was also one of the first poems to instruct me in the importance of poetry’s function of memorialising – “one of the things that art is for”, as Kinsella himself has quite rightly said.

In Grafton Street in those years there was a bookstore called the Eblana, which had a corner space where poetry was stocked. I used to slip in there and read what I could and slipped out again as a non-purchaser. When Derek Mahon’s debut collection Night-Crossing appeared  there it introduced a whole new dimension to my notions of what poetry could be.

I developed a short-lived infatuation with the Beat poets. But certainly one of the first poetry books that I bought was a Collected Dylan Thomas, that was in May 1969 – I still have it with the date inscribed. Also around the same time money from a part-time job went on a copy of Berryman’s His Toy, His Dream, His Rest.

Another factor, it has to be said, was the music that was in the air back then; the emergence of a generation of singer-songwriters whose lyrics aspired to the condition and gestures of poetry. All that prompted the urge to set down words in verse form and it was in 1968 that I made my own first attempts. I was 17 that summer and summers were usually spent away from Dublin with my grandmother in County Meath. A friend had given me a copy of the Penguin edition of the Liverpool poets and I had it with me. Roger McGough, Adrian Henri and Brian Patten. It was Patten’s voice – quiet, lyrical, passionate – that really appealed to me. That summer in Meath I wrote some verses that were, if nothing else, attempts at an imitation of Patten (possibly Kenneth Patchen too, who also come on to my radar).

Later that year, to my delight and astonishment, David Marcus, editor of the New Irish Writing page in The Irish Press, accepted five of them for publication and they appeared in the page in January 1969 – my first publication. To make it into New Irish Writing was regarded as some kind of achievement – especially when you see your work alongside a story by Elizabeth Bowen, which was quite a boost. Shortly after that James Simmons took a poem called Slowdance for The Honest Ulsterman. I had little sense that this was the beginning of a life in poetry – though I am hard put to see the merit in those early attempts now after a lifetime of reading and writing poetry and even in workshops daring to instruct others in what makes a good poem.

Meeting Michael Smith of New Writers’ Press was, I think, a key moment. Though meeting may not be quite the way to describe it – I simply landed on his doorstep one evening, a stranger wanting to meet the poet of the neighbourhood. I had come across some of the early NWP books in the local library – his own With the Woodnymphs, Trevor Joyce’s Sole Glum Trek, and the debut collection of Durcan and Brian Lynch, Endsville. What really came as a surprise was that there was a tree with poetry blossoming on its branches in my own backyard, so to speak. The press was located only a stone’s throw from where I lived in Francis Street.

Emboldened by my own appearance in print I made my way to Warrenmount to call on Michael and introduce myself and that started both a mentoring process that led to publication of my first collections, as well as a life-long friendship and a lifelong admiration for Michael’s own poetry and work as a translator. That was in January 1969 after my appearance in New Irish Writing.

Mike generously shared his own library and became my pathfinder, guiding me in the direction of numerous poets who were to become instructive in my understanding of the creative potential that poetry offered. Many of these poets were in translation from European languages. He was adamant about the importance of looking beyond the Irish, European and American traditions. He loaned me a copy of an anthology called Modern European Poetry which I carried around like a book of revelation. It opened a whole new world – Rilke, Quasimodo, Pasternak, Montale, Mandelshtam, Akhmatova, French surrealists, German expressionists and of course his own beloved Spanish poets – Lorca, Vallejo, Paz, Neruda, Machado –the last of whom was the one whose quiet qualities greatly appealed to me. I was also attracted to the rather melancholy world of Georg Trakl, his dark but beautiful and enigmatic lyrics.

I continued writing and Mike became my first reader – a man of often austere judgments but always encouraging and, looking back, I have to admit to being stubborn in the face of his critiques and suggestions and wish I had followed some of his directions at the time. I did later. In essence the point he kept making was that the richness of poetry was to be found in the everyday. I think I foolishly started out with some notion that poetry could only be created from the elevated themes and subjects, an idea that probably had it origination in the school classroom.

I generally hung out at New Writers’ Press – and helped to hand-set a few of the publications: there was an edition of Borges, Michael Hartnett’s The Hag of Beare, a Jack Spicer book.  There was of course a social and drinking side to it to – and it was in that milieu that I first met other poets: Hartnett, James Liddy, Brian Lynch, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain and Macdara Woods. Durcan too and, on one occasion in the house in Warrenmount Place, Austin Clarke – then a quite venerable figure in Irish poetry and I was dumbstruck in the great presence.  Liddy introduced me to McDaids which was then still Dublin’s literary watering hole, but I had just missed the Kavanagh era, though the legends were being handed on and something of the aura hadn’t quite gone to the grave with him but was hanging around Grafton street. 

It was around this time, too, that Mike and Trevor Joyce launched The Lace Curtain which over only a few issues published most of the mainstream poets of the time as well as championing a revival of the reputations of the Thirties poets, particularly Brian Coffey and Thomas MacGreevy, the latter has always fascinated me and I just wish there had been more poems.

So it was a further boost to have work appear in the journal – though they were not poems I would care to have presented back to me today. In December of 1969 the press brought out my first small collection, The Flags are Quiet. It’s appearance in the window of the Eblana Bookshop, which I mentioned earlier, was akin to a rite-of-passage moment. 

I think most recent poets in Ireland don’t have much of a clue about how the poetry community worked when you were starting out. Was there an Arts Council or Poetry Ireland at the time? What else was around?

GS: Yes, the Arts Council was in existence but not Poetry Ireland which came much later when John F Deane, who was also an encouraging and generous contributor to my development, set it up. The council, much different and leaner to what we have today, was supportive of poetry publishing. The main publisher of Irish poetry then was Liam Miller’s Dolmen Press, bringing out work by the likes of Kinsella and Montague, Liddy and Hutchinson and most importantly revitalising the career of Austin Clarke.

Around the time my first small chapbook appeared from New Writers’ Press I was introduced to the author Mervyn Wall who was AC director. For young poets back then – and short story writers too – having work accepted by David Marcus for his New Irish Writing page of the Irish Press newspaper signalled a particular moment of sanction. This was the case for many of my own contemporaries. All of us, and I could name several, owe him much gratitude not just for bringing the work to a public audience but for the good counsel he provided in correspondence. David continued to publish my poems into the 1980s, though he correctly sent back more than a few rejections – always with good advice about the flaws and failures he saw in the work as it progressed.

There were magazines around, Poetry Ireland Review in one of its earlier incarnations, The Dublin Magazine and the Kilkenny Magazine. The Honest Ulsterman had started in the North and its then editor James Simmons was, as I said earlier, the second editor to accept a poem of mine. That too was in 1969. St Stephens was coming out in UCD – and although it may have seemed like a student magazine I still have my contributor’s copy that also carried work by Desmond Hogan, Gerard Fanning, Richard Ryan, John Boland.

Another distinctive, you could even say iconoclastic, addition to the magazine scene around the same time was Peter Fallon’s Capella, all it editions with terrific graphic art covers by the artist Jim Fitzgerald. As well as local poets Peter was looking outside of Ireland and issues had the likes of the Liverpool poets, Ginsberg, Michael Horovitz, Barry MacSweeney, a significant and influential English poet of the time, the Greek poet Radnotti and in one issue the lyrics of the singer Al Stewart. Brian Patten was a poet I particularly admired, and still do, and it was a particular delight to find myself positioned alongside him in the pages of Capella. As well as heralding a new energy in poetry that  magazine was the first stepping stone on Peter’s way to creating Gallery Press.

My first reading was in the upstairs lounge of Sinnots pub in South King Street – not the one there now but its predecessor. Regular readings were run by the poets Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Pearse Hutchinson, Macdara Woods and Leland Bardwell – the four of whom went on to establish Cyphers in 1975 -  thankfully it has been consistent all the years since and that journal has survived and continues to appear thanks to the dedication of its editors. Those Sinnots readings were another rite-of-passage for a young poet.

Do you review poetry or have you? Poetry is still a small world, and was even smaller at the time you have been talking about.

Yes, occasionally I will review a volume but, to be honest, won’t now take on a review it unless I am enthusiastic about the work, and can be positive about it or feel some affinity with the poet or, as in some cases, believe the work of a certain writer has been neglected or fallen under the radar.

Many years ago, in the late 1970s and into early 1980s, I acted as a kind of regular poetry critic for The Irish Times. I have always been grateful to the then literary editor Brian Fallon for his faith in me as a reviewer and for giving me the opportunity to try out my critical responses to work. I remember years later having a conversation with the late, much-missed Dennis O’Driscoll about those reviews and telling him how much I regretted things I said in some of them, responding as I did then with the arrogance and know-it-all of youth – something I detect and dislike about some younger critics now.

In just such a state of opinionated self-regard I made some dismissive comment or other about a very senior and respected poet that elicited from the then editor of the Irish Times Douglas Gageby the comment Wait till he gets his hands on your next book. And in an extraordinary twist the same poet did get my next book to review for another publication but gave it the kind of review any young poet would wish for. He also gave me a lesson in the generosity of spirit that reviewing requires. That of course also illustrates how we operate in a very small pool, with poets reviewing poet-friends. Though this seems to be far more endemic in fiction circles these days.

Of course a review has to be honest and in the cause of novice poets, helpful to the poet who may or may not welcome critical comment. Certain allowance has to be made for the marks of a beginner, though a good critic will know instinctively whether the beginner has what it takes to keep going. But there is nothing dishonourable about bringing some sensitivity to what has to be said, and especially how it is said. Of course any review will carry the attitudes of the reviewer, that is unavoidable – that is fine, a review with an agenda is another matter.

Which writers do you think have been neglected? Why do you think that happens?

Every generation produces its share of forgotten and neglected writers. And of course some simply go out of fashion. In a survey of neglected writers many years ago I nominated Denis Devlin as a much neglected writer who deserved a restoration of his literary reputation. Now, the figure from that Thirties generation for whose work I have the highest regard – and there is only a very small corpus of it – is Thomas MacGreevy, an odd maverick figure in poetry.  His work does turn up in the odd anthology but overall he is kept very much in the backroom of poetry, like his fellow “modernists” of that period.

When I was rereading poets for the anthology of Dublin poems I co-edited with Pat Boran, it struck me that the work of Austin Clarke probably does not receive the esteem it deserves. Although he has been on school curricula and championed by perceptive critics such as Maurice Harmon and Christopher Ricks, I sense he is possibly now viewed as being outdated, to which I say au contraire  – long before the hidden Ireland of the time was exposed Clarke was speaking out in his poems and satires about the cruelties in schools and orphanages, the abuses of clerical authority, the moral issues of Catholic conscience, the plight of unmarried mothers, the issue of priestly celibacy, the bigotries of the devout, and the censorship laws.

Clarke’s magnificent burst of late creativity was astonishing, what we all wish for perhaps - his poems of indignation and rage at the political and social failures of a state that disappointed him made him our greatest satirist after Swift. His Mnemosyne Lay in Dust as well as its distinction as a magnificent meditation on a personal breakdown also holds a place as an important social document, a journey into the heart of darkness of the Ireland of that period of history. Apart from that he is, for me, an essential Dublin poet, the father of those of us who have taken up the city as a theme in our work. 

Two woman writers Rhoda Coghill and Sheila Wingfield (Viscountess Powerscourt) were rarities in the male-dominated world of Irish poetry in the 30s, 40s and 50s – with Wingfield in particular attracting the praise of critics and successfully sustaining a publishing career. Her first collection appeared in 1938 and in the 70s and 80s the Dolmen Press continued to publish her. Often informed by her classical readings, her poems had the mark of a striking originality and in the best of them she achieved an economy of crystalline language. As well as a command of the condensed lyric, she achieved mastery of the longer form in Beat Drum, Beat Heart, praised by Sir Herbert Read as “the most sustained meditation on war written in our time”.

Yet the recognition they both deserved never quite came their way. While Wingfield’s poetry was reissued a few years ago her life was revisited in an RTE documentary, Coghill completely disappeared off the poetry radar as far as I could ascertain when scouting around for work to include in  the anthology.  There are others – Eugene Watters (who also wrote under the name Eoghan O Tuairisc ) who at least should be known for the brilliantly constructed narrative poem The Weekend of Dermot and Grace; Padraic Fallon, F R Higgins, the great Cork and Belfast mavericks Patrick Galvin and Padraic Fiacc, each of them now under-appreciated because they are considered to be out of rhyme with current fashions; the list could go on.

Sadly I think two of my contemporaries, Sean Dunne and Michael Hartnett, both of whom died far too early, were underrated in their lifetimes and remain so today. Both of them were rare in that from the off they were surefooted in the craft and landed fully formed, not much in the way of apprentice work.

I think I have to conclude with this quote from W S Merwin’s poem recalling advice he received from John Berryman.

I asked how can you be sure

that what you write is really

any good at all and he said you can’t

you can’t you can never be sure

you die without knowing

whether anything you wrote was any good

if you have to be sure don’t write. 

(from “Berryman” by W S Merwin )

Gerard Smyth is poet, critic and journalist. He has published eight collections of poetry, including, A Song of Elsewhere ( Dedalus Press 2015), and The Fullness of Time: New and Selected Poems ( Dedalus Press, 2010 ). A sequence of poems in response to 1916, After Easter, with a drawing by artist Brian Maguire, was published in a limited edition by The Salvage Press in 2016. A new collection, The Yellow River,   with a series of paintings and drawings by Sean McSweeney, will be published by Solstice Arts Centre, Navan, in 2017 in conjunction with an exhibition of the work of poet and artist in the centre. He was the 2012 recipient of the O’Shaughnessy Poetry Award presented by the University of St Thomas in Minnesota and is co-editor, with Pat Boran, of If Ever You Go: A Map of Dublin in Poetry and Song ( Dedalus Press ) which was Dublin’s One City One Book in 2013. He is a member of Aosdána and Poetry Editor of The Irish Times.

Interview with Poet and O'Bheal director, Paul Casey

An interview with poet, facilitator and director of O’Bhéal literary nights Paul Casey.

Hi Paul and welcome to emergingwriter. Where did the impetus to start Ó Bhéal come from?

Firstly from my favourite two words, Poetry and Cork. And then from many places. I was aware of the scarcity of consistent venues, places where poetry can develop in the long-term and thrive through regular exposure, engagement and debate. I wanted to see it made less frightening. And to build audiences based on the qualities and potentials of the art form itself, rather than on its therapeutic abilities, or hungry egos. I’m no therapist. I’m in it for the craft. It partly came from a strong desire to give something back to my home city. Cork has always been a source of immeasurable sensibility and has been very good to me over the years.

I ran a multilingual poetry gig in South Africa when teaching there from 2003-5, which became quite popular, and after that I emceed in Dublin for Gerry McNamara’s Write and Recite sessions, over a couple of years. Ó Bhéal was born in April ’07, when there was no regular poetry venue in Cork, which seemed odd, if even embarrassing, especially when visiting poets would ask about reading here. They were present in Dublin, Galway, Limerick and Belfast at the time, but not here. Not in the regular sense at least, although they had been so previously. Some lucky timing for me.

I imagined a job where I could fire on all cylinders and sustain the full skillset. Writing, editing, film, multimedia, languages and teaching all rolled up into one. It made sense to combine them into a form of poetry service, so that I could be submerged in every aspect of it, both for my own growth as a poet and to add to the available choices within the wider landscape of poetry, the same scape within which so many writers like you and I need to actually survive. And to thrive. And for other selfish reasons. To widen my own education in poetry. To get on with the business of poetry. To encourage my own and others’ voices to emerge confidently within an informed, responsive, encouraging and challenging environment. A venue for all levels of experience to mingle and spark discourse, from the absolute beginner, to the master.

I wanted to shake up some of the prevailing perceptions of poetry and imagined remedying those induced allergies, remnants of rote-riddled, antiquated education systems. To attend an event where the full spectrum of poetry’s wonders, in all their marvellous permutations, could be welcomed and appreciated (or not!), and perhaps render certain boundaries meaningless. A forum able to counter and dissolve notions of elitism, doctrinaire clique-isms, egomania and so on. After seeing too many venues suffer from ego-inflammation (one is too many), its contagions and absurd exclusivities, I developed a strong need to level the playing field in whatever way possible. A bit like what Kate Tempest has been on about recently, but also to depoliticize the space to some extent. Another aim was to promote a culture of emcees, self-regulated, both for the cultivation of good and respectful compère practice and to keep the personality of the event in a kind of ego-resilient state of flux. 

Aside from the apparent benefits to poets and poetry, it’s a financial disaster, just as 99% of all poetry-related work tends to be. Now for the annual price of a short film, we could maintain ownership of one of the world’s most successful poetry programmes. And the merits prove multifold, in a venue where any member of the public can feel safe to engage, dip a toe or dive straight in, or simply enjoy. To not feel like an alien. To explore what’s possible in poetry, welcoming the spoken, written, traditional and far beyond, while being regularly exposed to a wide range of what’s really good. Pushing where it can go, what it can do, how it can marry. Ó Bhéal seemed the best way forward, although it’s far more demanding at this stage.

Kate Tempest was talking about intellectual snobbery amongst poets, which is common, but I have to say, also common in other walks of life. Of course there is a conflict between performance and written poetry. There is some terrible performance poetry that if performed well, goes down OK. But equally there is some dreadful page poetry that gets published and lauded based on the name. Good performance poetry has to stand up on its own merits on the page, but page poetry that doesn't perform well, or is never performed, is missing something.

  

I agree Kate. On all accounts.

So there are no egos at O'Bheal? How do you manage that?

There are plenty. We just keep them too busy with poetry overload. Mine included.

Can you be a bit more specific about the financial disaster of the organisation? What sources of income do you have? And what are your costs?

It’s an opportune series of questions, for which I’m grateful. Our drive for long-term funding is underway and we have just over a year left to secure Ó Bhéal’s life beyond ten years. The various Arts bodies have funded us consistently since 2007. These are, with current figures: The Arts Council (€3000 pa.), The Cork City Council (€2200 pa.) and Foras na Gaeilge (€2400 pa.). These are all down from previous years. 

For 2016, the Arts Council increased their award to €5600, a welcome surprise and sorely needed relief for minimum fees. One difficulty of course is in having to spend 100% of any given budget with having only 50% up front. Tricky enough with irregular cash flow, but we're very grateful regardless and hope it's a sign of more permanent things to come. It may catch on even more yet, that in appreciating the foundations of poetry we surely honour the most valuable of our traditions. That the invaluable, cultural payback can never be quantified.

Over our first six years, Poetry Ireland would fund 3-4 readings per year @ €250 per reading, which allowed us to intersperse the programme with poets from the more established arenas. This has been reduced to €300 p.a., which goes entirely towards our Winter Warmer Festival (which cost €5600 this year). 

Of course I’m acutely aware that these bodies are all under significant pressures of their own. Still, relatively speaking, it’s a lot cheaper than most arts budgets, especially considering the return. The rest of our income arrives via donations either through the donation jar, or through online campaigns.

Our new www.gofundme.com/saveobheal campaign explains this. We ultimately need to generate the equivalent of €40,000 per year for Ó Bhéal to continue beyond 2017. I’m certainly doing the work of at least four people. My plan B is that once our administrator is fully trained (and effectively reducing my hours), I should be able to squeeze in a part-time job somehow. It sounds like a world of full-time stress however - not unlike the present scenario. I teach night classes twice a year at the Cork College of Comm, which helped me in a small way to relieve the deficit when I was on the CE scheme, but now the Social takes back almost 95% of what I earn there.

At current rates and aside from my own ‘income’, Ó Bhéal is costing in and around €16,000-€18,000 per year, and we usually fall a couple of grand short of that, which I cover personally. And that’s with completely inadequate fees for poets. I’m on Jobseeker’s Allowance (CE Schemes last max 2-3 yrs per person), where at any moment I can be pulled on my ‘availability’ for work. It’s tenuous. I won’t manage beyond April ’17 without a wage, if I’m allowed continue for that long. If we don’t have any positive sign by this time next year, we’ll start to wind down. We won’t book anyone beyond the 10^th Anniversary event - and will go out with a Bang! On the other hand, if we can secure a basic director’s wage plus at least a 20% increase in programme funding, we could be set for another five to ten years. I’m trying every avenue possible, including European funding.

The community has gradually taken on more of an active role in driving the programme. It’s more community-driven now than ever; we have a board of 12 members who meet four times a year to decide on guests and volunteer activities. A lot of these talented writers and artists jump on board when we need them to. Our international reputation and network is fairly established at this stage and growing fast. I don’t understand why we can’t seem to attract more serious funding attention. I do believe that the national value of the event will be very hard to replace. Impossible, in fact, without a great deal of expense. The logistics are immense. I even have to maintain two sets of accounts each year to retain access to funding. The Tax Year for the CRO and the Calendar Year for City Council funding. You can’t take your eye off the ball for a day.

How well is your Five Words competition going?

The Five Words International Comp is sailing along slowly but nicely. It’s attracting very good work. It hasn’t covered the associated costs yet, but is about 80% of the way there. It’s only in its third year, so with a little more encouragement and spreading of the word etc, it should create a small profit margin before too long. Then we can pay judges and up the prize money.

What about sponsorship? Is that a possibility?

Outside of our constant appeal to regular Arts funding bodies, in early 2015 we posted comprehensive appeals for sponsorship off to 150 corporate social responsibility officers, carefully picked from a database of 1000. We have since heard back from about forty of these, each whom have committed their budgets to various charities. Only Dunnes came through from the private sector, with 1000 euros for the Winter Warmer. We’ve recently set up an ongoing gofundme campaign, which has raised almost 700 euros.

Winter Warmer sponsorship is sought for each year at local level, via our board members and volunteers. This year’s Winter Warmer has mercifully been completely covered by (in order of contribution): The Long Valley, Rising Sons Breweries, Forum Publications, Foras na Gaeilge, Cork City Council, Poetry Ireland, UCC School of English, Arc Publications, The Quay-Co-op and Café Paradiso. But the Winter Warmer makes up only a tenth of Ó Bhéal’s annual remit.

The financials are gloomy. Tell me about your writing. You write in different forms, don't you? What have you been working on recently?

I’ve just sent off Virtual Tides to Salmon, due for launch in February at Munster Lit’s Cork Poetry Festival, all going well. Then at the AWP in L.A. The forms vary significantly more than in home more or less. There are prevailing themes, while narrative, tone and subject matter range far more broadly. It’s a fleet of traditional forms, sound poems, concrete poems, stone circle poems, lyric poems, prose-poetry, two didactions [sic] and an after poem – that probably sounds a bit motley crew but I’ve enjoyed being a lot more experimental, especially in terms of space on the page and shifting dimensions ... I’m very excited about it.

That sounds like a fascinating mix. What do you mean by a sound poem? And what is a didaction? And an after poem?

I use the term ‘sound poem’ loosely. The idea of poem as soundscape, rhythm and lyric gathering and building towards a sonic boom, is one which has gripped me for some time. Narrowing the poem’s proximity to music. Constructing the poem on a foundation of sound clusters, cloud-storming the topic’s associated sounds into alliterative, assonant and rhyming groups to gather the base material. It culminates in work which is more song than narrative. More orchestral than cerebral. While all poems are of course sound poems, in some sense, I have about half a dozen in the collection which are intensely sonic, hence the term (albeit probably too broad).

Didactions? Mea Culpa! That sounds quite lecturous. It must be from working with all those sound poems. I meant to write redactions - that peculiar breed of found poem that results in an entirely new and strange animal. Take a newspaper article that you’re drawn towards. Remove any words you don’t like. Keep going until you whittle it down to the bare essence of what you see most in it. Like redacted legal documents, omitting what you don’t want seen, but to coax out a hidden code, or image, etc. ‘After’ poems, some prefer to call ‘response’ poems or imitation poems. I rarely write them. When I do they’re usually tongue-in-cheek and just for fun – like, I Wandered Lonely as a Drunk, after Wordsworth, or The Song of Plundering Genghis, after Yeats - neither of which are in the collection. The ‘after’ poem is one made in the same style (and/or form) as another poet’s verse, often retaining lines or phrases from the original, and would without doubt be considered plagiarism without due reference to the original author. I’ve included one such ‘after’ poem, Inside the Bonsai, after Yehuda Amichai’s Inside the Apple.

That sounds like fun. Would you read the sound poems or almost sing them? I wonder would any of these be worth using as a workshop exercise?

One could do either I suppose, depending on the occasion. Reciting or reading poems aloud usually seems to ring somewhere in between song and speech. And more so one than the other, depending also on the context of presentation. It’s never quite melody, never quite oration. I’m open to adapting the emphasis though, the pace, timing of a piece etc, for musical accompaniment. And yes, it’s great for workshops! While kept busy assembling the musical components of the language, the poem takes form. It’s an effective, evocative constraint.

In all the time you've been running the O'Bheal, you must have heard all types of readers. What ones do you remember (for good or for bad. Non names!) How have they influenced you in your own reading? What tips would you have for other readers?

So many voices! I can remember something significant about most, if not all the poets we’ve presented. I believe that everything we’ve ever read or heard has influenced us in some small (or big!) way. Whether specific techniques or mechanisms, symbolic usage, exquisite lyrics, gripping narratives, hypnotic performances, satirical mastery, experimental genius, new possibilities in rhythm or form, or even the gravitas, courage and the sheer character of certain astonishing poets, I find it impossible to name a few. I imagine trying to do like steadying a kite in the cross-winds of five hundred perpetual gales and storms, each the bearer of countless poems and passive influences, residues of style and voice amalgamated through their own reading. I can’t tell what has or hasn’t influenced me anymore.

As mentioned, the subject and stylistic range of my work is very eclectic. My reading material has always been eclectic, as have my interests. But not so in my reading of poetry, until 2004. A dozen years ago I would have said Eliot, Yeats, Amergin, Shakespeare, Homer. Nothing contemporary whatsoever. To illustrate, in 2011 I was closing in on home more or less at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre. Three days into this fortnight-long residency, I suffered an acute anxiety of influence attack. Total panic. I couldn’t tell how much, if any, of my recent work was being influenced by what I had been reading or listening to. And my solution? So very typical of me – to plunge straight into the deep end. Purge the doubt before it grew into a monster. I must have been really desperate. Over the next three days I speed-read 196 collections from the Tyrone Guthrie poetry library, and by choosing one line from each book, formed fourteen cento-sonnets. That way, while smothered in a widespread and colourful tapestry of simultaneous influence, I could let the cards fall where they may and forget about how much of whom or what might be creeping in. To say who or what styles have influenced me any more than any others, would take some considerable reflection. I do believe strongly that there’s something in every poet’s work to learn from and appreciate, no matter how small, and in doing so one’s bag of tricks deepens. Sparks lead to sparks. One’s poet must be allowed to grow, be it consciously or otherwise.

You read 196 collections! Crikey. I doubt anyone else has done that in so short a time. Guinness Book of Records?

I’m in heaven when in seclusion for extended periods. And starved of it so much of the time. When I manage a two-week residency like at Annaghmakerrig, I average thirteen hours writing/reading per day. That would have meant five collections per hour over three days - but that’s trawling each book for just the one line. If I found it on page five, I’d move on. I don’t think Guinness would consider that reading!

Does your eclectic reading and interests come out in your writing? Any unusual topics in your recent poems?

It certainly does. It used to worry me, but now I relish in the variety. Since my first collection I’ve written about things like obsolescence, stone circles, environmentalism, foley artistry, bars, confined spaces, migration, the virtual, history in the present, joy, language, writing, music, war, fun, love, hypocrisy, inspiration, humanity - I could go on.

The Winter Warmer must be some undertaking. At least you have the experience of organising previous events. Where did you end up?

I woke up as director of an extensive poetry programme. Be careful what you wish for, right? But I awoke doing what I love most, albeit while treading water. The Winter Warmer takes up about a tenth of the year’s work, but is quickly becoming Ó Bhéal’s crown jewel. You’d think that after almost nine years of cultivating this, that the Arts Council would be taking us just a little more seriously. 90% of the festival budget is sourced from local business. This amounts to a little more than a third of our annual income, which has to cover the other fifty events. If Ó Bhéal can’t secure annual funding by its 10th anniversary, I’ll need to find a paid position somewhere (if I’m not forced to do so sooner) and the weekly series will end. If that happens, I’ll focus more on the festival, the competitions and the Unfinished Book project. I won’t have the time for any more unpaid work.

Considering that Ó Bhéal now has a paid employee with an office in the Civic Trust house, while its director lives off a portion of his Jobseeker’s Allowance, one phone call and all the cards could come tumbling down. Technically I could go to jail for running Ó Bhéal, while being ‘available and actively seeking work’. At least I wouldn’t have a rent problem, and would have loads of time to write.

You sound quite down about the financial future. What can we do to help?

Ah, I’m not so much down as frustrated with the funding bodies. Ó Bhéal keeps my spirits up all year round. I’ve no problem turning a new page if it comes to it, though I do love this particular formula. Know any rich patrons? No, seriously, the best way to help is to keep writing your best poems! Ó Bhéal wouldn’t - couldn’t exist without the continual rivers of excellence which often flood contemporary Irish poetry.

I don’t believe poets should have to be asked to fund their own platforms. Certainly not when they can hardly fund themselves. Should artists pay for galleries? Should comedians pay for the stage? Musicians for radio time? Filmmakers for screening time? I know it’s not the same, but we’re well aware there’s no viable commercial model for promoting or fostering poetry outside of universities. If anything, it’s upping the dialogue around the vitality of, and crucial need for poetry, which has any chance of improving this unique state of affairs. I don’t think it receives the respect or attention it ought to. Especially not in a country built upon poetry. Minds need to change. As do prevailing perceptions around its societal value.

As things are, about 20% of Ó Bhéal’s overall income comes from donations offered up by poets. That is more than enough help, and more than there should need to be. Poetry is an exception within the arts and the relevant ministries should acknowledge this overtly. Ó Bhéal now having a paid administrator is taking some pressure off now, so I’ll have a bit more time to turn over all those stones. It won’t be over till it’s well and truly over. And sure, 10 years is a good run.

Finally, can you tell us a bit about your collection, Virtual Tides? Are there any themes or threads running through it?

Reels and reels. Elemental, political, love, loss, the geographical, geological, musical, digital, spatial, even threads on existential awareness and states of unawareness. It’s certainly hungry for alternative perspective and solution, whether simpler or more complex. It considers how changing historical influence can affect our negotiations with people and the world. It seeks to elicit common sense and healthy concern, to consider things differently. If we’re doomed to be greedy, as a simple example, why not be greedy for a more pleasant world? It wants to remind us of the personal choice we can still make - to take responsibility - for just one small part of that overwhelming, tidal whole. On a political level it’s a call for a more visceral, melioristic approach to our faltering world, where solutions themselves are now rapidly becoming extinct.

Some of the poems in Virtual Tides attempt to tap into instinctual memory. They want to lure from the reader their latent ability to unleash a more ancient, holistic and more selfless form of intelligent functioning. To liberate a form of thinking dulled down by preoccupations layered over eras. Some of the echoes found across this suite of poems have their own effect, outside of the poems. It tries to reconnect the ever-more distanced reader to the actual world, to rely less upon, yet appreciate the virtual - for all it’s reflective and pragmatic benefits, so as to consider more than the self. That the self depends on the health of the whole. It hopes to challenge the hypocritical, the egocentric and explores self-imposed distancing and isolation. It even hopes to dispel the virtual entirely at some point, if just for a moment. I hope it offers a few different ways to think about things.

Paul will be reading from his collection at the always excellent Cork International Spring poetry Festival in February.

Interview with Dublin Book Festival

I thought you might be interested to read the interview I did with the lovely people at the Dublin Book Festival before I took part in RTE Arena live radio programme talking about my poetry book, The Space Between, available to buy direct from the publisher here.

Q: How long have you been writing and was it always poetry towards which you were drawn?

I started writing as a New Year’s resolution for 1999 and haven’t stopped. After struggling on my own for a while with stories, I joined an evening class in Lucan where the writer Stuart Lane, led us, not always gently, into the unchartered territory of character creation, plays and poetry.

So I have had some fiction and non-fiction published and broadcast on RTE Radio. I also had a short play performed by Red Kettle theatre at the Waterford Royal Theatre. A couple of years ago I had a piece of satire included in the “New Planet Cabaret” Anthology that started on RTE Arena but in the last few years, 95% of my writing has been poetry.

Partly I think because it’s the poetry muscle I am exercising, so that’s how my brain is working but partly because I went back to working outside the home full time around then and found poetry easier to fit into the spaces between working and family life. I write on the train commuting in and out of Dublin and in the evening and at weekends, I rewrite.

Q: The Space Between (Doire Press), your debut full-length collection, has just been published: how long have you been working on the poems that make up the collection? Were they written with a collection in mind?

The collection changed its title umpteen times in the last few years. The Space Between is a line from one of my poems, “Reaching Agreement”

Your lips move but I’m hearing
the way you taste the space between your words,
phrasing so there’s something more than silence,
an emphasis pregnant with promise.

Once I’d settled on that, I realised that there are lots of spaces of different kinds that are touched on, in one way or another in the poems. There is a space between a poet and the reader or listener, and also a space between the voice of the poet and the person who is the poet. So between the ‘I’ in a poem and the ‘I’ of the poet, which are not the same. That’s what I wanted to show with the picture of a Venetian plague doctor mask I chose as the cover, a mixture of performance, laughter and death. I think it’s a striking image but I also like that it indicates the performer and the audience and the space between them.

I’m from Coventry but I’ve been living in Ireland for more than 20 years now but I still see a space between Ireland and Britain, between Irish and British people. Between people, friends, family. I have a Physics degree and have been working in IT for years so inevitably my love and fascination for Science shows through in some poems. I like to think of The Space Between stars and galaxies as well on the smaller scale, between sub-atomic particles. I’ve read at the Science Gallery before and I was Poet in Residence at Science Hack Day Dublin this month, which was a first.

In the collection, the oldest poem is from 2000, my first published poem from Poetry Ireland review. It’s about changing the toilet roll, among other things, and it has been used as an example in creative writing workshops that you can write a poem about anything! The most recent poem is "Unintentional Installation," a riff on the William Carlos Williams poem “The Red Wheelbarrow.” I was in Dingle last year with good friends and fellow poets Triona Walsh and Maeve O’Sullivan who together with Barbara Smith make up The Poetry Divas. We had a gig at Feile na Bealtaine there. (Brilliant festival and fantastic destination) Triona and I went for a walk in the rain to at Art Exhibition and there was this wheelbarrow…

Q: Tell us a little about the Poetry Divas. What inspired it?

The Poetry Divas are a collective of women poets. We read our own poems at events and festivals all over Ireland, blurring the wobbly boundary between page and stage. We tailor each show to the occasion and audience and aim to give a deliciously infectious show that’s bound to touch a nerve. Events have included Dromineer Literary Festival, Dundalk Book Festival, Electric Picnic, Caca Milis Cabaret, Flat Lake, Leonard Cohen festival, Kildare Readers Festival and Allingham Festival.

What inspired it was that I wanted to go to Electric Picnic but the tickets were too expensive so I applied to be a wandering troupe of poets in Body and Soul. And they said yes, what are you called?, so I had to think up a name on the spot.

Divas have a reputation for being temperamental but I prefer the definition that implies glamorous, successful, confident and independent women. Some spoken word and literary events can be unbalanced, not only for gender but also for generation so we like to tip the scales a little. We get a great kick out of performing for audiences who rarely come across poetry and the best feedback is when someone comes up after and says “I don’t like poetry but I like yours.”

There's lots of other interesting interviews here.

Interview with Poet Jessica Traynor

Hi Jessica and welcome to emergingwriter. Thanks for letting me interview you. How did you first get into poetry?

Poetry was always something that was around, and part of family life. My grandmother was a big influence – she loved literature. She had to leave the civil service when she married and after having seven children, decided to study at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London.   She was the first Irish woman to graduate from Central, and she came back to Dublin and began teaching speech and drama in schools in the inner city. By the time I came along, she was retired, but her house was full of old speech and drama primers that had rhymes like ‘I Do Not Love Thee Doctor Fell’ and ‘Antigonish’ in them.

I had a difficult start when it came to school and reading. I started young, having just turned four, in a class of much older children and was told by the teachers that I was stupid. My mum had to teach me to read at home, but once I got started, I devoured everything I could get my hands on, including all those speech and drama primers (skipping past the boring elocution bits to the gorgeous, mysterious rhymes). I got really hooked when we started reading poets like Robert Frost and Walter de la Mare in primary school – it was the atmosphere of this kind of work that really appealed to me, that sense of reaching towards something unspoken or unsayable. I was so excited by these poems that I depressed everyone at a big family party at age eight by replacing my usual (hated) party piece, ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’ with a poem about a man who comes back to a house full of Unseen Listeners in a Yellow Wood after a long absence. The Listeners.

The Listeners is a poem that many people found inspiring. I remember it vividly  and the picture on the page of the poetry book. Then you started writing?

I then started writing seriously bad teenage poetry at about age sixteen, and sharing the poems with a boyfriend, also an aspiring writer, who thankfully had the sense to tell me how terrible they were. This actually kept me going, as without the challenge I might have lost interest. I wrote all the way through college and then started sending stuff out after I finished my Creative Writing MA in UCD.

Tell me about the Creative Writing MA? Did you go straight there from college? How did you find it? What did you find hard? Most surprising?

I studied English with History at Trinity and then applied for a couple of Creative Writing MAs when I finished up. I’d developed a small portfolio over the years with the visiting Writers in Residence in Trinity (Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Paul Durcan) and it got me accepted onto the Creative Writing MA in UCD, where I worked with Éilís, Harry Clifton and James Ryan. There’s a lot of controversy over Creative Writing MAs – people seem to think writing is this absolutely inherent talent that you either have or you don’t – but I think that makes about as much sense as trying to play a piano concerto without ever taking a lesson. Talent is essential of course, but craft is important. Many writers with great talent who never have access to a programme which helps them find their own writing structure and discipline don’t manage to stay the course. I’ve also heard people say that these programmes churn out writers with no individual voice, but I would say that aping the voices of others is a part of the process of learning – you either get through it and transition to the next level or you don’t. And people are going to tap into a zeitgeist simply by reading what’s popular and successful at the moment in any case.

The Creative Writing MA was a fantastic time. I won’t claim that these courses will make you a writer, but when else will you have the space and time to spend a year reading and writing purely for your own development in the company of intelligent, successful and generous writers? I was lucky enough to get into my MA just before fourth level grants disappeared, so it was a win-win situation for me. I feel I learned a lot and would recommend a Creative Writing MA to any aspiring writer. It’s also a first step in creating a writing community for yourself – meeting likeminded people in the writing world who you can share ideas with. This community is such an important thing for any aspiring writer – not because you sit around praising each other’s dodgy poems, but because you are all at the same stage and can (and should) be honest with each other.

The most difficult part of the MA is the leaving of it – getting back to reality. But then, the onus is on you to keep writing and stay a part of some kind of writing community. It’s this mixture of hard work and self-motivation that seems to keep most writers going in the face of countless rejections. 

Do you remember your first published poem?

I do indeed. I had two poems accepted around the same time. I can’t remember which was published first but they were ‘Moon Snake’, published in the Western Writers Centre newsletter, and ‘Black Horse of the Liberties’, published in the Stinging Fly. Both would have been late 2007, I think. It was really exciting to see them in print. They became these strange artefacts that seemed to hold some intrinsic value bestowed on them by someone else’s decision that they were worthy of publication – I think that’s the feeling you get when you first publish. It’s a high you keep chasing.  Both of the poems made their way into my thesis for my MA which I take out and cringe over whenever I’m feeling too big for my boots!

Oh well that demands a why (the cringing)

I think most of us look back on early work with some sense of embarrassment. Although I did take out my MA poetry thesis after I submitted the final draft of the manuscript of Liffey Swim to Dedalus and had a look over the poems. What was interesting was that I could see that I was trying to tackle similar themes in the poems I'd written in my early twenties, but in what was probably a very artless manner. It's good to still have those poems as a reminder that your voice may develop as a writer, but many of your preoccupations stay broadly the same.

That’s very interesting. I’ll have to go back and read some of my early poems.

So, next question. When I was struggling to choose which poems to put in my collection and which to leave out, someone said to look at each poem, and decide that if someone selected this poem as the one to remember from the whole, collection, would you be OK with it? Which poem from your collection, Liffey Swim, would you choose to be the one you would be happy to be the only one that someone would remember?

That’s a tough one. One of the most surprising parts of having the collection out there has been the reaction to certain poems. One in particular – Egrets in the Tolka - that’s been singled out for praise in every review is one I was sure wouldn’t make the cut and was editing up to the last minute. Others have been criticised in one review and praised in the next, which is always interesting. I think the poem that’s my personal favourite, that feels the most successful to me is Scenes from a Poor Town. It may not go down a storm at readings, but I think it’s the poem in which I’ve got closest to presenting something imagistic, something without authorial commentary. Of course, the choice of words and images are essentially comments in and of themselves, but there’s less white noise here, if that makes sense.

Yes, I can’t always tell which poems will go down well at a reading and which won’t. I’ve a couple of poems I love that just don’t work out loud. Having said that, some poems will work well in one environment and not at all in another. The audience makes such a difference. I suppose that’s why actors can do the same play every night and it come out different. So what do you have coming up?

Well I'm currently working on my 2016 commission for A Poet's Rising, a project led by the Irish Writers Centre.  I'm writing about Dr Kathleen Lynn, a fascinating woman whose positive influence on the development of our state extends far beyond her involvement in the Easter Rising. I want to make sure that my poem reflects her legacy as well as her actions at City Hall. All of the poems will be filmed and will be part of an app, so that'll be an interesting new experience. And of course the calibre of the other poets involved - Eilean Ni Chuillinean,  Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill,  Thomas McCarthy,  Theo Dorgan and Paul Muldoon - makes it a daunting challenge,  but one the I'm excited about nonetheless.

That sounds like a fascinating project, but hard. I find it very tough to write a poem to order. Even to a theme, unless I can adapt an existing poem.

Yes, it’s been a real challenge. I’m having to take a really different approach to the work, and I think the poem I come up with will be quite different from anything I’ve written before. I want to try and tell a story that’s a little more complex than revolutionary glory, and yet I want to write something accessible and communicative. There’s a first draft in existence, but it needs a lot of work.

The next few events on the horizon after that are readings at the Allingham Festival in November and at the Troubadour in London early next year.

Angela Carr, Dave Lordan and myself are also in the middle of our Autumn series of Double Shot at Books Upstairs. We're delighted to be partnering with O Bheal and Over the Edge this series, and we even have some great guests lined up already for next Spring. The September event will be announced next week, so keep an eye on our Facebook page.

Tell me about Double Shot. What’s the thinking behind it?

The idea was to try and create a regular reading opportunity in Dublin for poets who may get fewer opportunities to read here. There are lots of regular gigs in Dublin for spoken word, acoustic music, performance poetry and this is a great indication of the health of the Dublin scene, but I felt we were missing the chance to see poets read for a little longer outside of book launches and festival appearances. There's a bit of a gap there that we're hoping to fill.

Dave Lordan had originally approached me about setting up a reading series, and now I curate and he MCs. After the first series Angela Carr came on board and does brilliant Web and PR stuff for us. It's been great fun so far and we've some really excellent readers lined up for Autumn and next Spring. As we're all pretty busy we only do seven readings a year - three in Spring, three in Autumn and a special Summer event - so we haven't been able to say yes to everyone's requests to read, but we're hoping to create a reading  series with longevity, so we'll get there in the end.

What do you personally get out of attending poetry readings?

What I get is a totally different insight into a poet's work. No matter how closely you've read the work in question, hearing it aloud will bring some different aspect to the fore - a tonal quirk you hadn't noticed, a music you hadn't quite caught on the page. And readings are important for poets too - that unmissable chance to demonstrate the intended tone and pitch of the work, to give your lines life and emotion.

Where do you write mostly? 

I would love to tell you that I have a beautiful dedicated writing space complete with desk surrounded by bookshelves stocked with nothing but obscure contemporary classics, but in actuality I have my sofa and a banjaxed laptop (I spilled coffee on it) which me and my husband share. So I often fit my poetry writing in around sports live streaming or work away with the TV on in the background. We’re thinking of trying to convert our attic, but honestly I imagine I’d get lonely up there and would still spend most of my time on the sofa. And we’d probably still only have the one banjaxed laptop in any case.

In the photo you can probably just about make out some of the books I’m reading at the moment balanced on the arm of the sofa – Shirley McClure’s gorgeous Stone Dress is on the top of the pile at the moment.. There are also a few plays in development there that I’m reading for work.

I too write on a sofa, curled up unergonomically. For a change of perspective I sometimes sit on the other sofa.

The other sofa is my napping sofa so not sure how much work I'd get done there!

  

Thanks Jess, I think we’ll leave you there on your sofa, reading, writing and napping. 

The Lyrebird

All day I have been practicing

small sounds of annihilation.

In the forest, not only the axe-men

hear the sound of falling trees –

me and the lyrebird stand in a clearing

mimicking the dok-dok of hatchets,

the banshee-wail of chainsaws,

speaking their words back to them

in our mangled patois,

because when the end comes,

isn’t some kind of conversation

the best we can hope for?

Biog:

Jessica Traynor’s first collection Liffey Swim was published by Dedalus Press in 2014 and shortlisted for the 2015 Strong/Shine Award. She has been engaged by the Irish Writers Centre to write a poem on Dr Kathleen Lynne as part of ‘A Poet’s Rising’, one of the Arts Council’s 2016 commissions. Poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Abridged, The Penny Dreadful, Poetry Ireland Review, The Irish Times and in the anthologies Hallelujah for Fifty Foot Women (Bloodaxe) and If Ever You Go (Dedalus Press). Her poems have been translated into Polish, Irish, Czech and Italian.

She was awarded the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary in 2014, and was named New Irish Writer of the Year at the 2013 Hennessy Awards. She works as Literary Manager of the Abbey Theatre. She blogs at https://jessicatraynor.wordpress.com/