Poets I go back to

Naas public library in the Town Hall, Naas

The poem that shocked me into an appreciation of the power of poetry is lost to me. I encountered it when I was in my teens and had edged surreptitiously across an invisible line into the grown-up section of our public library in Naas in County Kildare. 

This was a serious frontier to cross: you could borrow most books if you were over 18 but some had dark red labels and you had to be over 21 to borrow those - and I was under 18. 


Extract from my article in the "Poets I go back to" series in The North, No.47. Read the full article here ...

Poets in medicine

New Zealand poet and doctor Glenn Colquhoun.

Examination of the mental condition of a person who seems to have dementia might seem like an unpromising subject, but I think there's something beautiful in Glenn Colquhoun's poem A mini mental status examination. Here's the first verse:


She told me that it was summer and that we were in the south of France.
The night before we had heard a man sing beautifully on the street 
Her father was important and young men had always sought her.
I was no exception.
She complained of the heat. 


Extract from my article on Poets in Medicine, originally published in the Irish Medical News, 2009. Read the full article here....

Poets in the parlour or on the barricades?

Reading Carol Ann Duffy's poem on the murder of three men in riots in England, I began to wonder about politics and poetry and especially about the political or polemical poem. Yes, we write about our lives, our memories, the contents of our subconscious and so on and it could be argued that to do so with an absolute respect for the meaning of words is a political act in itself in a world in which meanings are routinely twisted to conceal the truth. On the other hand, we are in danger of becoming parlour poets - maybe this has already happened - with little relevance to anything or anybody outside our precious selves. Carol Ann Duffy uses imagery, alliteration, rhyme and near-rhyme in her poem and I think this matters. In an article on Poetry International Web in 2002, Ko Kooman wrote of political poetry that "that which makes it poetry is always some intrinsic poetic quality which has no relation to any purpose or goal."

I am not advocating here that we give up writing our personal poetry in favour of political poetry. I am not advocating anything at all. I would suggest though that the political or polemical poem deserves a place in the repertoire. Might current references shorten the shelf life of a poem? In my opinion, no - because poetry doesn't actually have a shelf life. For 99.9 per cent of us, the people who hear or read our poems during our own lifetimes are the only ones who are ever going to hear or read our poems - and that still applies whether we are published in books or win prestigious prizes. So poetry is for today, not tomorrow.

I have only written one deliberately political/polemical poem, about trafficking of young girls in the sex industry but I mean to write more and the composition of a polemical poem will be one of the options for participants in my Write One Poem workshop in October.

You can read Traffik by clicking here. It's the final poem on the page.

Ted Kooser's tips for poets

If you write poetry, Ted Kooser's book The Poetry Home Repair Manual is a delight. Kooser (pictured above) is a former US Poet Laureate who edits the syndicated column American Life in Poetry. His column usually features poets who are alive and kicking - unlike those written by his Irish counterparts (insofar as they also have newspaper columns on poetry) Ulick O'Connor and Anthony Cronin who favour long-dead poets and often long-dead poetry and who thereby do incalculable harm to public perceptions of poetry in my opinion.

OK, rant over. Where was I? Oh, yes, The Poetry Home Repair Manual. I'll be recommending to participants in my Write One Poem Workshop that they treat themselves to reading it at some stage.To see why, check out these points from the book (the points are mostly my paraphrases):

 - "...express strong feelings without expressly stating those feelings...letting the behaviour of the participants show us how they feel."

 - Test opening lines as if approaching a stranger on the street at a crossing: would they frighten her away or would they draw her in?

 - You almost always hurt a poem if you choose its structure before you concentrate on giving shape to an experience or emotion.

 - ...you can think of writing your poem as a means of persuasion because a poem can be looked at as something to bring about an action. That action need not be more than a momentary change of mood, or a realisation.

 - Try shifting parts of the poem around. Try swapping the end and the beginning.

 - Put the exposition information into the title and not into the poem itself.

 - Try writing out your poem as prose to spot simple errors.

 - Consider using names, brand names, people, plants.

 - There is little need to tell the reader of the speaker is happy or sad if you have carefully described the associations the character is drawing through senses.

 - You can begin a poem with a comparison and then expand on that comparison tomake a whole poem.

 - Consider using natural units of conversational speech.

(Kooser, Ted, The Poetry Home Repair Manual, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2007).

The cinquain - made in New York

How would you do if I asked you to define a cinquain without looking it up? Me neither.

I've heard of it of course but I just didn't know what it was. It's all explained in Philip Hobsbaum's book Metre, Rhythm and Verse Form.

The cinquain is a descendant of the quintain, a form from the Middle Ages, comprised of a five-line stanza.

The variation by Adelaide Crapsey (above), born in 1878 in Brooklyn Heights, New York, became known as a cinquain and is very much identified with her to this day. It's still a five line poem but  based on syllable count as follows:

2 syllables with one stress
4 syllables with two stresses
6 syllables with three stresses
8 syllables with four stresses
2 syllables with one stress

Here's her cinquain November Night:

Listen…
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees
And fall.

And another, Triad:

These be
Three silent things:
The falling snow…the hour
Before the dawn…the mouth of one
Just dead.

Crikey - especially when you consider that she wrote much of her poetry in a race against death, following a diagnosis of tuberculin meningitis.

I was tempted to try out this form on people doing my Write One Poem web/workshop course in October. Then I tried to write a couple of cinquains myself and found it impossible to write anything satisfying in the form - a reflection on me and not on the cinquain, I guess. So I won't be imposing it on my workshop participants.

For more on cinquains and Adelaide Crapsey, go to cinquain.org and The Cinquain Page.

Yesterday's Pinstripe Suit

Who'd once happily have driven
an oil and gas pipeline through
his own granny's front room; or 
plopped a twenty storey car park
on the last sliver of green this side 
of the Mad Cow Roundabout.

So begins Kevin Higgins' poem Yesterday's Pinstripe Suit in his latest collection Frightening new furniture, pubished by Salmon Poetry. Unlike most poets, Higgins deals with the recognisable events of today and he does so with humour as well as insight. Another example, from his poem The Financial Times:

This year for their birthday, everybody gets
the blame. We find our trousers
repossessed and down around
somebody else's ankles.

Poetry can be about today's headlines - I'll be advising participants in my Write One Poem worshop to read Higgins' "pinstripe suit" poem and you can read it here on the Salmon website (scroll down the link page).

A social class in a poem - with humour

Choosing poems for people on my Write One Poem workshop to read, I particularly liked This was no Ithaca from Rita Ann Higgins' book Hurting God - Part Essay Part Rhyme (scroll down the link page on Salmon Poetry to read the poem). In a poem laced with humour, compassion and anger, she encapsulates a social world, a point in history, issues of class, depression and gender. All this in a poem so easy to read you could almost say it reads itself.