FICTION

Extract from The Elysium Testament (Trident Press, 1999).

"November 20 …

Since living in Elysium these past years, so near the river, winters in Lucan are not what I'd imagined. Today there is smog, yellow outpourings from chimneys, mixed with freezing vapours from the Liffey. But the frozen dawns are beautiful, and the silky summer ones. I enjoy the unimpeachable silence of ice, the sight of snow frozen in stiff dagger-like blades to the branches that overhang the river. Above the trees, the sky is a mass of stars that flash and almost fizzle in the dark. There is always the sound of the river, but behind it a wonderful winter silence that does not break, even when branches crack above the river's frozen edges. Then the earth tilts, year by year, and we live again within a globe of crazy fertility, of weeds sucking against rocks, even the occasional kingfisher at pools upriver from the weir.
Above all, growth, the only thing to save us from ourselves.
On my way back from the supermarket this morning, I watched the shadowy imprint of the sun through the flying fog. It hung like a leaden ball and I thought, this is it. This lamp, ball, light, coalescence, is all there is. When it dies, and when the solar flares stop flaring, so will the seasons. So will we. We'll have nothing to respond to. The earth will cry out for heat and light and in the end, it too will die. The people who inhabit this place in the far future will be powerless in the new creeping dark of a dying sun. Pituitary glands will cease to function, hormones will not flow. The delicious mess which we call love and lust will not happen because the central light cell at the heart of our universe, our body of bodies, the true temple of the spirit, has died.
But light goes out in different ways. When I got back to the house, I lay on Roland's bed and counted the blue sheep which you painted when he was two. Cloudy mountain-blue sheep, they race one another around the wall of the room. His bed still carries his smell. The uncovered pillows hold traces of his saliva, his sweet night drool, like maps of lost islands, the comic-book kind where treasure is buried. Tomorrow, perhaps, I'll put on pillow-slips, the ones with the dancing clowns, his favourite.
I still hope.
I stil hope, some mornings, for a sign.
That he might come again, my love, my tender son, to this house, to his own bed at Elysium.

Swords and guns criss-cross the bottom of the bed. Khaki coloured rifles. Green plastic water-pistols. He kept them there in case he needed them at night.
'Sometimes he comes,' he once told me.
'Who?' I would ask.
'T'udder Roland,' he would reply.
'Is he nice, the other Roland?' I probed, content that our boy had imaginary friends just like many other children.
'Sometimes.'
'Only sometimes?'
Roland looked into my face, inviting me to read his mind, to understand what he could not express.
'He's the boy what makes me cry,' came the slow reply.
'Well,' I exclaimed in mock horror, 'I don't know what kind of a Roland that fellow is! To do that to you? He can't be a very nice friend, can he?'
'He comes at night.'
I felt a prickle of disquiet, at the thoughts of the child's peace being disturbed.
'Does he wake you?'
'No. I never asleep.'
'Of course you sleep, silly boy!'
'I never asleep. I wait for him.'
Bernie always said Roland looked like a child that wasn't getting his proper rest. But I didn't like to push the door open, in case it creaked and I disturbed him. He was a light sleeper, that I knew, so I left him alone most nights, unless the great terrors came over him.
People speak of the presence of the dead in their lives. That's the easy part. But perhaps he's really gone and that's all there is. What survives is the presence of pain, barely his, more mine, ours …."

Excerpt from a story in my upcoming new collection 'Storm Over Belfast'

A Genuine Woman

None of us ever cheered Hitler on, because quite early in the war, Mike knew about the Jews. He had read something in The Manchester Guardian, something so awful we could hardly credit it. And although some of our neighbours could be quite gleeful as Adolph advanced across the Continent and showed the English who was boss, we were not. Austria, I always felt, was not much different from Germany, so I did not really think about the annexation there in 1938. Of course, I know different now. And when Poland fell in 1939, we were not so worried either, even though it followed quite naturally on the mean way he took Czechoslovakia, and after him saying he only wanted the Sudetenland! But the early summer of 1940 was another matter entirely. Denmark, Norway, Holland and France fell like dominoes. Somehow, the war became real, no longer a game which we could watch from our safe little independent island!

The evening before our lives were almost destroyed with shock, I went into the garden and leant over the limestone wall. I must have been quite still for some minutes, my thoughts drifting, for quite suddenly the fox appeared. From the corner of my eye I glimpsed it. Then I turned and all I got was an aftermath of orange, rust, the streak of his foxiness left like an imprint on the eye.

It's strange the things you remember. Not the event itself that joined us to the war. That doesn't come first, although it should, God knows it should. Often, it's the fox I see when I think of that day, because I also glimpsed one at daybreak, only two days later, as I stood at the landing window with Sean's old copybook in my hand, as I read and re-read his records: Bag for Season 1939-40. It's the fox I still see when I try to keep hold of myself after what happened, to keep the thing in my heart. It's not as if Mike doesn't know. I believe he does, that he tolerates it, tolerates my struggle with my own heart.

On Sundays Sean would sometimes take his gun out. He showed me his log-book the day before he died, and for some reason which I cannot recall left it behind him in the kitchen, everything written up in his square handwriting, a month by month and season by season account, dated and totted up to show the total bag for any season. For example, I know that in the first week of February that year he shot seven rabbits, two pigeons, two duck, five teal and four snipe. His total bag for that month came to thirty-three.

'Ah Kate, it's me you should've married!', Sean would tease me.

'You must be joking, boy!' I'd scoff, smiling in spite of myself, knowing what would come next.

'I might not be much, I know that ...'

That bit always upset me. Maybe he was smart, running himself down like that, or maybe was truly humble. I think he was humble, quite different from Mike, who, when I thought about it, had had everything at his beck and call.

Mike was always coddled. Adored by all, his mother and father, and the aunt and uncle that reared him. Loaned at the age of two to the aunt for a few weeks, sent the few miles down the road to their farm, before long he had them charmed. Just like he charmed me later on. His parents, who had children of their own, left him there. An act of compassion, you might say. Whatever way they loved him, it filled him with ideas and plans and interests. Now he is the creamery manager at the Shelburne Co-Operative Society, Campile, and I am his wife. The aunt frowned on me. Still does. Not good enough. A dairy maid that spent her days whacking butter after the churning, shaping and squaring the pound and half-pound with the butter-clappers till it fitted the waxy paper. The ridges of the clappers had to be scrubbed till they were sterile.

'Sterility is everything! Everything!' Mike would roar at us girls, terrified of bacteria.

But he was a gentleman, I'll say that for him. That continued after the wedding too. When first I began to notice his interest in me, I was struck by his nervousness. He was almost cold. Almost. He can look very strict when he's not sure of his ground. Fear extends his tallness, he holds himself more erect than ever, the shoulders stiffen and his face is like a mask, the long hollows below his cheekbones full of shadows and the darkness which hints at where he shaves.

But then he began to consult me about things that were unnecessary and obvious to anyone but an imbecile. He would point out different aspects of the new machinery in the dairy, running his hand over the tinned copper piping, or along the side of the great vats. Everything in our working lives was milky. The smell of it, the froth of it as it rose in the vats when the farmers delivered, then the other smell that came when it was heated, for separation, to one hundred and ten degrees Fahrenheit. When the cream came off, it in turn was pasteuriszd to one hundred and ninety degrees Fahrenheit. The slops, the skim went back to the farmers for whatever use they wished. The dairy had a biscuity, safe odour, almost of the breast, except nicer and sweeter and there was maybe a thousand gallons of the stuff.

I wore a new suit for our wedding, dark green wool with a black velvet collar and velvet trimming along the edges. The buttons were in a lighter green, some kind of glassy stuff. He insisted on going to Dublin to choose the best he could afford. The wedding was reported in the local newspaper, ending with the words: The happy couple are spending their honeymoon touring the West of Ireland. We stayed in The Old Ground Hotel, Ennis, then we visited the Burren. A strange place, compared to what we were used to. I could not feel safe on those great plains of stone, no matter what unusual flowers and weeds grow there. The Cliffs of Moher terrified me. Mike became impatient with me up there, because I refused to stand up in the huge gales that blew that day. If the truth be told, I often felt lonely on my honeymoon. The only place I warmed to was a coral strand in Connemara, one evening as the sun turned the restless waters of the Atlantic to floating fires, and the mountains behind us seemed the colour of a fox.

Afterwards, Mike thought of everything. He never wanted me to be worn out having children year after year, like his own mother before him. Ours were never to be reared with an aunt or uncle, no matter how kindly. So children we had. Two sons. Then no more children. He saw to that on his one and only trip to London. On his return, they didn't check his luggage at Customs. It is one of those things that still fills me with mirth, to think of those gim-faced customs officers watching out for dirty books and pictures and preventatives of any kind. The things he took home to Campile proved useful enough, once we understood how to use them. The book, which was written by a woman called Mrs. Marie Stopes, explained everything. These items I kept in the mahogany tallboy, in a special drawer with a lock on it, for my woman's things, (where I also keep Sean's copybook now). Mike thought that the best thing, that I would have recourse to the preventatives when and as I thought necessary. He was not, in spite of the care that he took to provide the things that helped us in matters of love, a great initiator. That was left up to me. Still and all, Mr. DeValera up in Dublin city was well and truly foxed, hell mend him!

All fiction ©Mary O'Donnell.

POETRY

From Unlegendary Heroes (Salmon Poetry, 1998)
Unlegendary Heroes

'Life passes through places.'
- P.J.Duffy, Landscapes of South Ulster

Patrick Farrell, of Lackagh, who was able to mow
one acre and one rood Irish in a day.
Tom Gallagher, Cornamucklagh, could walk 50
Irish miles in one day.
Patrick Mulligan, Cremartin, was a great oarsman.
Tommy Atkinson, Lismagunshin, was very good at
highjumping - he could jump six feet.
John Duffy, Corley, was able to dig half an Irish acre
in one day.
Edward Monaghan, Annagh, who could stand on his head
on a pint tumbler or on the rigging of a house.
- 1938 folklore survey to record the local people
- who occupied the South Ulster parish landscape.

Kathleen McKenna, Annagola,
who was able to wash a week's sheets, shirts
and swaddling, bake bread and clean the house
all of a Monday.

Birdy McMahon, of Faulkland,
walked to Monaghan for a sack of flour two days before
her eighth child was born.

Cepta Duffy, Glennan,
very good at sewing - embroidered a set of vestments
in five days.

Mary McCabe, of Derrynashallog,
who cared for her husband's mother in dotage,
fed ten children,
the youngest still at the breast during hay-making.

Mary Conlon, Tullyree,
who wrote poems at night.

Assumpta Meehan, Tonygarvey,
saw many visions and was committed to the asylum.

Martha McGinn, of Emy,
who swam Cornamundern Lough in one hour and a quarter.

Marita McHugh, Foxhole,
whose sponge cakes won First Prize at Cloncaw Show.

Miss Harper, Corley,
female problems rarely ceased, pleasant in ill-health.

Patricia Curley, Corlatt,
whose joints ached and swelled though she was young,
who bore three children.

Dora Heuston, Strananny,
died in childbirth, aged 14 years,
last words 'Mammy, O Mammy!'

Rosie McCrudden, Aghabog,
noted for clean boots, winter or summer,
often beaten by her father.

Maggie Traynor, Donagh,
got no breakfasts, fed by the nuns, batch loaf with jam,
the best speller in the school.

Phyllis McCrudden, Knockaphubble,
who buried two husbands, reared five children
and farmed her own land.

Ann Moffett, of Enagh,
who taught people to read and did not charge.

My Father Waving

In the New Year, we drove away
from the house on the hill,
shrinking, shrinking,
encased in ice, fragments of Christmas
in winking fairy-lights.
My father waved with both arms
like Don Quixote's windmill.

From the brink of motherhood,
lives swept past to be scuttled
on the reefs of the present;
then a processional: those quiet generations
moved through evening ice the colour of Asia,
described the entrances and exits,
parents of parents
like Russian dolls re-entering my body,
telling what was never told anyone,
announcing it now to my unborn girl.

The unstill past entered, forgotten
ghostlings and wanderers fussed
and made ready for the future -
one step ahead, bridging dawns,
afternoons between birthdays
and Christmas. The vision
displaced the crammed wells of my fear.
In the New Year, we drove away.
The child turned beneath my ribs,
the parents of parents waved.

Poems from September Elegies
Solstice

Clouds have cleared. The Wicklow mountains
undecked of weeks of rain, leave
liquid ledges that over-spilt the carping skies.
On this final day of the sun's trifling
with veils of moisture, low horizons,
there is light above - not the hopeful shaft
of a megalithic dawn, the silence in grave passages
as it steals through, then fades prematurely -
but a full six hours with earth and sky
revealed like chiaroscuro.

The lakes stretch out in loops,
like the eyes of slowly blinking water gods,
shorelines knotted with submerged boats,
as the ground squelches and soaks, but the sky
is a clear patch on the canvas of the global north,
mountains are semaphores, boue-grey signals
brushing open air, inviting light to enter and re-enter
streams, crotches of trees, the pores of our skin.
We are fully pleasured.

Necessities

Time for pruning, my annual appointment
in the garden. Poised to cut back and trim,
I interrogate trees on the question of excess,
argue in favour of vigour, the prospect
of uncluttered grace. Light is honey-coloured,
flows in rivulets over lingering shoots,
bathing piebald autumn, skewed leaf, the flaccid rose,
preparing them to yield. The garden's specked foils,
dazzle of spice red stems, saffron garments,
await the merciless crange, my diligent cut
an act of kindness for the sake of sleeping shadows.
It grips neatly, encloses the resistant wood until
my shoulders strain, then the swift short passage
as metal meets metal and the bough snaps and tumbles.
One morning, long after old branches have burned,
I will look out, watch how trees calibrate growth,
the bonds, of excess, the need for death.

How the Tongue reads an Apple

Now the apples are dreaming
of strange sugar, of bounty as never before.
The pale pink innards of Beauty of Bath
are saturated, already plump with syrup;
unearthly acids provide just the right tang,
held back, restrained as the sun-borne sugars
whittle deeper through the skin, and still nights
act as sealant. Dawn, like a voile hammock,
holds the bursting globes, the wet fruits,
until tongue tastes flesh, cunning-sweet
aroused, the darts of bitter, caressing.

Homes

In half sleep, I almost forget that I am here,
and not with you in our own house.
When I open my eyes, a breeze
flickers at the curtains, light pierces,
a lance gleams across the bed.
I take my bearings,
cross the room to look down.

The garden is lit, a spectral daylight,
or an August eclipse
where we compose our lit and unlit sides.
Here, where I grew,
I imagine the ones
who will love and be anguished
together, as families are. Someone

will look down on this garden as I am doing,
in the middle of the night, someone
will be possessed with pleasure and sorrow
at an unannounced hour,
some middle-aged girl or boy
will know everything is borrowed:

a home, a wife's or husband's body - a gift,
as yours has been, your skin ardent as the moon
burrowing across the sky to this room,
far from where you sleep.

Mary O'Donnell's New & Selected Poems, New Island Books

Eight Ways of Looking at a Crow

IAn old man, ragged as an uncle
on his way to Benediction, suddenly dull
at the end of his season, virginal,
the lone one at a distance from
the screaming flock above cut wheat.

II
A secret that wants to be outed,
wearing black like a new widow,
uneasy with the arrangement
of the sky after a spring storm. Hailstones
were not expected, nor ice from the north
chaffing feathers.

III
A signature of air, a tumbling
question-mark as the wind drops,
or an exclamation mark plummeting,
sharp as a black diamond into the soul.

IV
These inheritors are not meek.
The earth is theirs though they are
distant as God, aware of glinting
metal insects trailing long roads:
killer-machines.

V
Instant death is preferable
to a broken wing, a snapped leg:
see the grown nestlings gather,
shrouded, round black eyes aglitter
with the prospect of loss.

VI
The man would be wise as Solomon,
speaking without a magic ring, to
the crow. Perennial retainer,
autumn projectile shooting
below the clouds. Heavy as stones,
they fall, call, wild with socialising
when corn is cut and mice
are on the run.

VII
The woman is sapphic, speaks
in runes near the edge of the garden.
In the mist, she hopes her white kimono
will dupe them, calm them. Motionless,
she waits for their inspection,
hears them call to one another,
like corner-boys or women standing
in sunlight, the world suddenly warm
as massed feathers.

VIII
Fly with us! Fly with us!
They do not really mean it,
but intention counts. A chance
to stand on hill, dolmen, cliff,
head tilted back, dipping up
to the lake of the sky, arms spread,
testing the wind, wondering.
Fly with us! Fly with us!

Wilderness Legacy

I leave two books, as promised.
The Buddhist one on suffering, and
The Rubayyat of Omar Khayyam,
for the sake of a verse about
a loaf of bread, a jug of wine
and ‘thou beside me in the wilderness’.

For myself a dream of the Isle of Isla,
imagined from long ago, cottage
near the sea, black dog to guard me
when I wasn’t communing with Gallic poets.
You, occasional visitor to my wilderness,
would bring an extra seam of light,
that indefinable male gleam, itself a speech-
form conversing with my body.

Mostly it’s wilderness I seek. Buddha
can’t ungrow the harvest of suffering.
When you read the Rubayyat you’ll know
the huge joke on all of us, will sense
a ruthless finger, its protracted prodding.

To the shore now. The black dog
waits. He loves the way I smell
and how I speak to him.

The Derries, 1976

Photos show me in shorts, acting the farmer, pitching
a twist of hay onto raddled cart, hair haloed, light itching
my skin. It wasn’t the place for a tryst, your father’s land
a mile beyond the tunnel bridge, those few days, hand-

braided by ourselves, with tricks and contrasts, a dark hayshed,
smell of straw in the flecked bower when the old man was led
far away, a speck on the bog’s brown tide. The freest time:
my body tingled with all that lay ahead, a blind sublime

eye reading to the future. Even rapture deceives, never
as imagined, the world still spinning; I see you lover, as ever,
worrying about being caught in thick clouds of hay, our haunt,
I, laughing my head off at the notion, foreseeing the jaunts

I’d lead you on, the naked swims, unchoreographed, wine-
drenched dances, my best, my precious gift, a refusal to toe the line.

From : Speaking in Tongues

1.
The Virgin Mary Shell
Inchydoney Strand

guests are warned to replace it should they find one.
a receptionist shrugs off the mystery,
remarking that it’s rare

outside, a beach of latte sand gouache flickering
gulls
          because I do not search, I find
weightless in my palm, trove, voluptuous square
with rounded corners, now held to the sky, an offering
like the hip socket of an extinct sea creature

markings are miniature, ciphers, posted
from the Atlantic, a graceful ‘M’ pierced
on bone-white: rotate the shell to see
the vital ‘V’

this is no Marian alphabet, but a vulva,
scored by an idle mer-boy imagining
the world of bifurcated beings, oceanic
Sile na Gig, umber cunt beneath an ‘M’

further along scallops clams whelks cockles:
discarded jewellery, flung aside in the toss where
waters meet, where getting to land retreating from land
nosing in boning deeper withdrawing again
before the tumult of a landing – is what matters

two tides, two pulses,
iconic erotic
       what we have
                   all we need

All poems ©Mary O'Donnell.

The question of how to be a writer, in particular how to live with poetry, how to inhabit it and be inhabited by it is something which concerns most writers. I do not subscribe to 'crisis' philosphies, insofar as I believe that regular attention to the craft of writing and reading goes a long way to deflect the sense of invalidity (in terms of way of living, daily action and consequence) which bothers some poets. The article below may be of interest!

Poetry: in Crisis?
Language, grasped as a system, goes dumb (Elias Canetti, 1969)

That poetry as an art 'is in crisis' is a statement which surfaces every so often among poets, not unlike the lament of those who every so often inform the world that 'the novel is dead.' Neither statement, it seems to me, has the slightest grounding in the realities of either art. But the feeling of working within a crisis-ridden genre is overwhelmingly strong for many artists, who - finding themselves regularly confronted by the perception that written art must be at least entertaining and certainly immediately accessible to listening audiences - can hardly be blamed if a note of panic creeps into ongoing poet-to-poet dialectic.
We need to reflect a little on both historical hinterlands and contemporary foregrounds to the notion of a 'crisis' in what is essentially an aesthetic concern. There seems no question about the fact that many poets have traditionally oscillated between the feeling that the genre was inadequately heard, being undermined by the tawdry activities of fellow practitioners, and the occasional glory-moment in which the world briefly, glowingly, responded to what they (and others who think just like them) were saying. I have a distinct empathy for this poet-in-isolation, working with consciousness and language, for the man or woman chipping away on bits of paper, probing the phenomenal boundaries which reject or discard the noumenal, das Ding an sich, what haunts archetypal poets and pushes them to reject the system, and whatever word-shapes, mouth-utterances are systemic, position-oriented or Prozac-logical. These are the poets in crisis, for sure. These - our fellow creatures clad in the skin of a human, placed firmly within a social system which rewards position, affluence, glamour, material endurance, chick-lit and 'irreverent/funny' doggerel - are living in an interior far North, the equivalent of the literary salt-mines and for which they sense little respect.
They may be crisis-ridden due to over-exposure to barbarian values, but poetry is not, per se, in crisis, no more than hitherto in literary history, the point being that most of us - marooned in the contexts of the present - experience at some time or other the sensation of being at the pinnacle of some variously defined idea of progress, a sensation which is in fact quite illusory.
That the sense of crisis continues is all to the good, and the idea of good poets writing at odds with the world is nothing new. How else can good poets write? To be a poet in the first place is to have said goodbye to any flirtation with 'position' (in the socially accepted sense of that word), with what the majority approved view of anything is; it is like giving a jubilant two fingers to the notion that a) we are all part of the same group who b) share mostly the same political, social, economic and liberal, whey-faced views on most information-based subjects¹.
Poets themselves exist within a social and economic system which wordlessly conveys the view that most mysteries, even the poetic, runic ones, can be de-coded if you find the right formula. Poetry then, according to this outlook, is something simply thrown down on paper with the flamboyance of a visual artist thrashing paint around the canvas and then cycling across it (which isn't to denigrate that technique either, but to make the point that the potential audience for either poetry or painting sometimes seems convinced that the self-referential, unlettered 'abstract' is enough, that anything goes, that it is sufficient to pronounce the produced poem (or painting) as something that 'just happened', a bit like unplanned sex). However, the difference between the poem that 'just happened' in a self-indulgent splurge of faulty (if fashionably colloquial) syntax and lego-like construction, and unplanned sex is that the former has no point of reference outside the self and the self. It is a static, frigid form, devoid of the capacity to make the essential connection with something beyond the self, it cannot move outside the accepted phenomenal. The result of this is that the relationship with 'meaning' is absent, and also the idea of a metaphysical journey integral to the construction of a work of aesthetic incandescence². Again, a bit like sex, with roots in the repetitious deep-space of collective history, art compulsively attempts to re-invent the congruent delights of earthly and spiritual knowledge, over and over again.
The current crise, for me, is based on what I regard as the 'dumbing down' of work which has to be read more than once in order to be understood. No matter how poets evaluate the meaning of what they are about (and most poets think a lot about the source of their art and how it might flow), when it comes to the question of poetry readings the reality for many is that there is little place for the poet who is not a 'crowd-puller'. The 'bums on seats' syndrome so beloved of the world of theatre has entered the poetry arena, and in many of our stunningly-designed, well-funded new arts centres replete with state-of-the-art lighting and sound systems, arts administrators nationwide are under pressure to fill those auditoriums. I cannot blame them. Nor am I certain if there is actually one, single group at which the finger can be pointed. Poets must simply, it seems to me, come to terms with the fact that the Irish public does not greatly care for poetry, despite all the reverential mouthings about the subject among people who should ideally have a feel for the subject (English teachers, and lay-people who consider themselves to be 'readers'). The 'readers' in our society do not actually read much poetry, although they might be aware of who has published what. 'Readers' who do not actually read the contemporary are amazingly authoritative on it nonetheless and often quite at home with the notion that poetry should be 'immediate' and 'accessible'. Some poets are equally comfortable with immediacy and accessibility too and I have no cavil with such poetry so long as there is a respected space available for the poetry which has a totally different axis. I am speaking about poetry which collects the silences between the babble of what is acceptable, I am speaking about poetry which does not compromise for the sake of pleasing others, I am speaking about poetry which is prepared to put limbs into the sewers of human experience, which is capable of shrinking to the gravitational density of an object in a black hole, and which unremittingly does not care whether or not anyone is pleased.
This is not to be confused with my earlier comments on the self-referential. The poet who refuses to pander to the entertainment brigade, who refuses to play court-jester in the world of language, is in fact the diametrical opposite of the sentimentalist or humorist. This poet feels no pressure to be amusing, and has long ago decided that poetry - although quirky and wry at times - is generally much more connected to an authentic examination of consciousness than it is to comedy and feels no need to accommodate the contemporary zeitgeist in its diluted forms. Neither is there anybody much, if you're playing the numbers game, for whom to write. Some poets recognise this. It does not matter. Other poets sometimes read the work, plus a thin shaving of readers

¹ To be informed is sometimes the not-so-subtle enemy of 'to know': Henri Bergson has much to say about the vital, active, principle of knowledge that exists in everybody.
² take, for example, one poem which moves fluidly on the surface and has a narrative flow, but also, significantly, having a lot to say - with urgency - is attempting and achieving something much greater than the sum of its formal and accessible parts, Paul Durcan's A Snail in My Prime).

who are not poets. The rest, you realise as time goes on, are completely and utterly connected to fitting in an hour at a health and leisure centre, meeting for a pizza after Thursday late-night shopping, speaking energetically on such subjects as housing costs, interior design, labels on clothes and the poisonous social species of the mobile phone. These are the contemporary passions, whether poets like it or not. That is what we must live with. In other centuries there was something else to come to terms with, perhaps illiteracy, lack of access, the seriousness of contagious disease, the undemocratic structure of education.
The thing is, we as poets are inheriting the best and the worst aspects of the democratisation of our culture. We are cohabitators with other specialists on life's suburban plain, trained to the notion of individuality and uniqueness, to various buzz-words that make people feel better about themselves, and an accompanying awareness that as poets we live like monks in the flurry of the demotic, yet are casually regarded as equal specialists (you have your poetry, I have my photography) when we believe deeply, profoundly, that poetry is not about and never has been about equalities of any kind. That, and only that, is the true locus of the crisis in art.
While there is access now, insofar as anyone can travel a short distance today and find themselves a poetry reading, for example, there is also a peculiar inability (or unwillingness) to actually absorb what poets are saying and (more significantly) doing. The mind apparently blocks such concepts. The majority can read today, unlike one hundred and fifty years ago, yet the majority has never seemed less inclined to examine the humming dialectic between writer, nature and existence which is laid bare in the best poetry. Furthermore most people believe themselves to be conceptually equipped to critique what they are reading, and mistakenly believe that relative literacy plus a sprinkling of critical terms often purloined from the world of the movie-buff equips them with the ability to decide who is 'good' and who is not. This, in turn, filters into the world of poetry, I believe, fostering inevitable petty rivalries. Yet some of the petty rivalries are themselves tolerable, because one realises that they are merely the response of one wave of poets to another, usually older one. The established voices are there to be challenged, and the Young Turks arrive every ten years or so, hell-bent on upending whatever and whoever preceded them. It is a natural agitation between poets, and we should welcome it, because without a competitive agitation of the creative kind, poetry stagnates.
Like a great deal else in Irish culture, poetry too has skipped a stage in its development. Just as the economic line shot sharply to the top of the graph from the early nineties on in a development for which few were prepared and to which we are still adjusting, so too with poetry. Yes, we may have by-passed 20th century modernism, or a lot of it, leap-frogging gaily over the shoulders of the elders³ to arrive at something resembling post-modernism, but that may not matter if we are not complacent, if we do not assume that poetry is a sort of pseudo-mystical writing-by-numbers game, or that there are self-advancement codes to be cracked and How To books to be absorbed if one wants to head to the top of the poetry class.
Elias Canetti was referring to a 'social' system when he spoke of language being rendered dumb. That is the enemy: finding our energies, marshalling whatever it takes to be poets, just to be poets4 and not think of audience laughter at our witty outpourings, nor to think of sales figures (for the majority, modest!) or putting the spin on our 'themes' to make them palatable enough for a mid-morning radio programme or even television. Not all poets are smiling, dimpled creatures. Not all poets invest in charm. Not all have the mot juste to hand when it comes to conveying what their poetic fixation, their existential preoccupations and compulsions, are actually about.
If anything, this is a truly challenging time to be writing poetry. Never has anti-intellectualism been at such an all-time high, combined with such gross confidence and scant humility. In the nineteen eighties we used to hear stories of football stadiums being filled to capacity for poetry readings in the Eastern Bloc countries. How we envied that capacity to ensnare a public in such need of the ironic and subversive!

³ Sometimes lazily, believing the stereotype that because we were Irish we were good, regardless of what we wrote.
4 The Greek poet Pindar once said that our chief duty consists in becoming who we are …

Now, people clearly do understand the language and moods of the subversive - at least the concept is understood, judging by contemporary advertising on television - but it is despised, relegated to the bunkers of what is seen as no longer necessary and has no possible purpose, beyond immediate humour for those-in-the-know.
To survive the overweaning arrogance of the in-joke culture is part of the problem and part of the challenge for today's poets. The poetry is fine, and will be. So are the most of the poets, if they can hold out and just write. And not be too willing to please.

©Mary O'Donnell, 2002.