Ciaran Carson

Home , Ciaran Carson, James Simmons (poet), Paul Muldoon

The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast, 1962–1972 Heather Clark Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 256 pages. ISBN 978-0-19-928731-4

Memory plays tricks. Any time a shard of memory comes to light, whether dug up or stumbled upon, it is altered by the act of remembering. The facts of any case are open to negotiation. Our memory is a story constantly revised each time we enter it for confirmation of what we think we are or were in thought and word and deed. The little that we do remember is a retrospective construct, a self-ingratiating fable, perhaps.

Of course there may be material back- institution that seems to have cornered much up: documents, letters, drafts, typescripts, of the market for the papers of contemporary certificates, poems fully or partially Irish poets. Without access to these materials, achieved, receipts, photographs. Ephemera. Clark’s book would be a very different one; it Carbon copies. Flimsies. These too are might well not have been written at all. And open to interpretation. One can doubt their it is quite possible that no such access would authenticity, or raise questions as to their exist were it not for Coca-Cola, a point to selectivity. A researcher is not to know which I will return in due course. History is how much material a poet has consigned to full of unexpected contingencies. the public domain of a university archive, and how much he might have retained, or Clark’s narrative begins with an arrival burned, or lost. The poet himself might and ends with a departure. In 1962 Philip not even know. One fills in or makes up Hobsbaum came to lecture in Queen’s the gaps in the record. Or one might not University Belfast and for four years perceive a gap in the record. The writing of conducted a series of weekly writing history depends on such circumstances, and workshops. The workshops then continued we must make of them what we can: as the under the aegis of Seamus Heaney; and Seamus Heaney, ‘The football pundits say, you can only play the when he left Belfast for County Wicklow Salmon Fisher to the team that’s put in front of you. So it is with in 1972, the workshops ceased, though a Salmon’, Groupsheet, Heather Clark’s painstaking study, which, loose clique of sorts continued to operate Longley Papers, Manuscript in focusing on the work of Seamus Heaney, in various drinking establishments in the Archives and Rare Book Library, Emory University. Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James university area, where writers like Longley, Simmons and Paul Muldoon in the decade Muldoon, Frank Ormsby, John Morrow, Seamus Heaney, May 1970. 1962–72, makes considerable use of the Robert Johnstone, Douglas Marshall and Photograph: (John) Edward correspondence of those poets, their recorded myself would gather to indulge in gossip McKenzie Lucie-Smith, bromide print, National recollections, and their archival holdings in and the wicked but friendly banter known in Portrait Gallery, London. Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, an Belfast as ‘slagging’. In any event, the poets

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associated with the comparatively decorous work, along with the events which helped Hobsbaum and Heaney workshops became Belfast — once characterized by Louis known as the Belfast Group. Would these MacNeice as a city of ‘hard cold fire’ poets be the poets they turned out to be — to become, in Ciaran Carson’s words, had there been no such thing as the Group? the ‘mouth of the poem’. Was it a Group, or a group? A coterie? A mutual admiration society? Did its product I should say at this point that though I constitute an Ulster Renaissance? Was was involved in the last few sessions of there ever a Naissance? Do such definitions the Group, I am quite rightly more or less matter? Clark lays her cards more or less excluded from Clark’s study, along with squarely on the table: John Montague, Medbh McGuckian and Tom Paulin, since like them I was not ‘as While acknowledging that both history closely involved in the local renaissance as and literature will always shift and those who met under Hobsbaum’s roof’. But subvert any perimeters we place around I should point out that my gloss on ‘Belfast’ them, I want to challenge the notion that as ‘the mouth of the poem’ (in my essay the terms ‘Belfast Group’ and ‘Ulster ‘Farset’ in Belfast Confetti) was intended to Renaissance’ are a kind of reductive be taken playfully, as a spurious and ironic shorthand made up by critics and etymology for the Irish Béal Feirste, from journalists to fabricate a common goal or which ‘Belfast’ derives. Béal can indeed voice. On the contrary, this notion is the mean ‘a mouth’, or ‘an opening’, or ‘an myth that needs revising. Studying these approach’; fearsad, of which feirste is the poets’ (and their poems’) relationships genitive, can mean, according to Dinneen’s with one another complicates rather wonderful Irish–English Dictionary, many than limits our understanding of their things, including: a shaft; a spindle; the individual achievements, and raises ulna of the arm; the fibula of the leg; a provocative questions about the social club; an axle; a bar or bank of sand as at nature of literary production. As Longley low water, a deep narrow channel on a put it, ‘Moving forward with coevals and strand at low tide; a pit or a pool of water; potential rivals has a key role and it’s very a verse; a poem. In other words, I wanted seldom that someone flowers on their to loosen up the possible definitions of own.’ Longley hints at precisely the claim ‘Belfast’. I wanted to make it multivalent that I make in this study: that during the and polysemic. I wanted it to resist easy sixties and early seventies, these poets interpretation. I wanted it to imply whatever honed their craft both in accordance its beholder saw in it. Noting that Dwelly’s with and opposition to each other — a Gaelic–English Dictionary gives ‘wallet’ poetic practice which Bloom, referring as another possible meaning for fearsad, I to the relationship between dead and could say that ‘Belfast’ means ‘the opening living writers, calls ‘creative correction’ of the wallet’. Which brings us back to the or ‘willful revisionism’. It was in part archive, since none of the Irish poets in it, to such revisionism that drove the Ulster my knowledge, gave their papers to Emory Renaissance, inspiring a long-running for free. And, as a way of trying to make poetic dialogue which has produced sense of the recollections of the poets cited some of the finest poetry of the twentieth by Clark, their contributions to the archive, century, and making Belfast, says Edna and their subsequent place in her literary Longley, ‘Irish poetry’s strangest port history, I want to indulge myself in some of call’. To learn from this dialogue, we memories of my own, flimsy and unreliable must explore the intimate, interpersonal as they are. relationships that propelled these poets’

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Lyric Theatre, Belfast, c. 1976. Back row, left to right: Paul Muldoon, John Hewitt, Patrick Galvin, Frank Ormsby, Ciaran Carson. Front row: Seamus Deane, John Boyd, Michael Longley. Photograph: private collection, Belfast.

When, in 1993 (I only know the year block and found it given over to a display because I’ve just looked it up on the online of Coca-Cola memorabilia — vintage archive catalogue), I was approached by one bottles, trays, urns, mirrors, calendars, of the Kennys of the eponymous bookshop posters and other advertising materials, in Galway to sell my ‘papers’ to Emory bills, receipts, correspondences. I learned University, I was surprised and gratified that then that Coca-Cola was invented in Atlanta anyone should be prepared to pay good by the pharmacist and morphine addict money for the contents of a few cardboard John Pemberton, who in 1886 brewed the boxes gathering dust under my bed. And first batch of Coca-Cola in a three-legged the money was very welcome just then, so brass kettle in his back yard. The economy I had little hesitation in entering into what of Atlanta, and thus of its educational seemed to me a good deal, first with Kennys establishments, has been Coke-dependent and subsequently with Steve Enniss of for over a century. Emory. It is an arrangement that continues to this day, as I consign periodic batches Emory began as a small liberal arts college of written, scrawled or printed material to in the small town of Oxford, some forty the Special Collections Department of the miles east of Atlanta. In 1914 Asa Candler, Robert W. Woodruff Library, named for the the founder of the Coca-Cola company president of the Coca-Cola company who and the brother of a former president of in 1979 endowed Emory University with a the college, gifted Emory $1 million dollars gift of $105 million. The Coke connection and 72 acres of land in Atlanta. It became only came to my notice some years after a university that maintains its Coca-Cola the initial sale of my papers, when before links to this day. To give one example, its reading my poems there I attended a Coca-Cola Artists in Residence Program reception in the impressive penthouse currently provides ‘an opportunity to meet gallery of the Woodruff Library tower mutual educational goals through the

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Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon, 1977. Photograph: Heaney Papers, Manuscript Archives and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

unique creativity of the arts, to improve filled with words like ‘gush’, ‘buzz’, ‘fizz’, the outlook for arts education in Atlanta, ‘smack’, ‘glug’, ‘lip’ and ‘rush’. I never got and to improve the quality of life in the round to it, but I still entertain the notion, community’. I wonder if they give out free while acknowledging that the Irish poets Coke at the events held under the auspices in Emory’s Special Collections have been of that programme. I’d like to buy the world to some extent bought by Coca-Cola gold. a Coke. At any rate, besides the Ciaran Posterity comes at a price, though I should Carson Archive in the Special Collections of say that some of us who gave our papers the Robert W. Woodruff Library, there is a to Emory — Longley, Muldoon and myself Coca-Cola Archive. I was tempted, when I — once entertained the idea of doing some first heard of this serendipitously alliterative mischief to posterity by inventing a literary coincidence, to write, and sell to Coca-Cola feud between ourselves, complete with for what I thought might be considerable vituperative or apologetic letters that would profit, an ‘Ode to Coke’ — or maybe it then be consigned to the archive. But we would be called ‘My First Coke’ — a poem were too lazy, if not too moral, to engage in which, in Proustian fashion, would extol the such a conspiracy. virtues of the said beverage, and would be

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Anyway, maybe we are only getting back thus many conversations, the vast bulk of our dues. Back in Belfast in the 1970s, or which we cannot now remember. There are maybe it was the 1980s, some of us drank so many things we can’t remember. a great deal of Coke, not for itself — they had taken out the cocaine in 1905 — but Wondering if my memory of those times as a mixer for the notorious DRAC, Dark might be improved by consulting the Rum and Coke, ‘in a tall glass, with plenty catalogue of my papers in the Robert J. of ice, please’. You needed the ice to cut Woodruff Library, I enter its virtual Irish the syrupy sweetness of both dark rum and Literary Portal and go to ‘The Ciaran Coke. In venues like the Welly or the Bot or Carson Papers’. I’ve looked at the catalogue the Eg (aka the Wellington Park Hotel, the in a cursory manner before, but only now Botanic Inn and the Eglantine Inn) we would do I realize its full extent, and the full extent gather in twos or threes or fours or fives to of my memory loss, for when I click on drink DRACs and Guinness and Bushmills ‘Subseries 2.2b: Uncollected Poems’, and and Powers and talk. Heaney and Mahon scroll down the page, I realize that there had left Belfast by then. So ‘we’ would is much here that I have no recollection have included Longley, Muldoon, Ormsby, whatsoever of having written. Many of the Johnstone, Morrow, the critic Michael Allen, titles are a mystery to me: ‘At the Poetry among others. We talked a great deal about Reading’; ‘At the Zoo’; ‘For Reasons of a great many things, and poetry was not Security’; ‘Firing Range’; ‘To the German necessarily at the top of the agenda, which Language’; ‘Wrong Side of the Fence’; and, was fluid. There was lots of smoke in the ironically, ‘How to Remember’. Now what air: ‘in those days’, as Michael Longley says, that was about? There is a poem called ‘they hadn’t put the cancer in cigarettes’. As ‘Paul’, which I guess has nothing to do a matter of fact, the first words Michael ever with Paul Muldoon, for when I note that it spoke to me were occasioned by a cigarette. precedes another called ‘Philomena’, I now We were at a Group meeting, standing side do remember that at some time or other by side at the back of the small, packed I embarked on what I thought might be a back room of the English Department at series of poems named for Christian martyrs. 4 University Square. ‘Oh, a Parkie,’ he It came to nothing; or rather, it came to said, ‘I’d love a Parkie, haven’t had one for these two entries in the archive. years.’ He seemed to me to be putting on a proletarian Belfast accent. I was smoking But I am inadvertently reminded of Paul Park Drive untipped at the time, a powerful Muldoon, and some of the uncountable, and working-class cigarette. I proffered him the sometimes unaccountable, times we spent open packet — how often do you see that together drinking DRACs, back in whatever once familiar gesture nowadays? — and years they were. Back then, we drank and he took one, I gave him a light, and, as I smoked as if there were no tomorrow. remember it, for he does not remember it, he Paul was working in the BBC, I in the Arts said, ‘The name’s Longley. Michael Longley.’ Council, and we would often meet ‘after Of course I knew who he was, as I think work’, which usually meant about 4 p.m., in he must have known I must have known. I the Bot or the Welly. After one such meeting, was delighted to meet this luminary of the when the bars had closed, we ended up in poetry scene. Was it 1970 that we first met? Paul’s flat in Notting Hill off the Malone 1971? Who was the featured poet? I can’t Road, where Paul thought there might be remember, though I think it might have been further drink; or maybe we bought a carry- Heaney. As I tell it, the encounter is banal, out. I don’t know what time it was when but not inconsequential. Over the years we found we had run out of cigarettes. So Michael and I shared many cigarettes, and we decided that the best place to purchase

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Paul Muldoon, ‘The Indians on Alcatraz’, Groupsheet, Longley Papers, Manuscript Archives and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

more cigarettes was the BBC Club, which home. I am reminded now that this Notting 1 After writing this, maintained a late licence, so we could Hill is one of the Muldoon abodes — Chez I met Paul Muldoon in London. According get a drink there as well; and we decided Moy, a phrase I believe I coined — that to him, the vehicle in that the best way of getting there was to figures in his poem ‘History’. It is a poem, question was a Triumph drive there in Paul’s dilapidated Hillman among other things, about the unreliability Herald. Imp convertible.1 We got into the car to of memory and history. I thought it might be find that Paul was incapable of driving, so cited in Clark’s book, but it is not. I undertook the task instead, I who had failed my driving test about ten years before Where and when exactly did we first have sex? and hadn’t done anything about it since. Do you remember? Was it Fitzroy Avenue, Somehow we got there. We entered the club, Or Cromwell Road, or Notting Hill? bought cigarettes and drink and stayed and Your place or mine? Marseilles or Aix? talked some more until we were asked to Or as long ago as that Thursday evening leave. When we emerged, we’d forgotten When you and I climbed through the bay window where I’d parked the car, and the memory On the ground floor of Aquinas Hall ends with us staggering through the streets And into the room where MacNeice wrote ‘Snow’, of Belfast, searching for the means to get Or the room where they say he wrote ‘Snow’.

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Table of drink in Wellington Park Hotel, Belfast, April 1978. Left to right: John Morrow, Ciaran Carson, Frank Ormsby, Jimmy Simmons, Michael Longley. Photograph: BBCNI (Wil- fred Green).

What exactly did we talk about, at his place and indeed Muldoon, in the period covered or mine? It’s all a blur now, but it seems we by Clark’s survey. Though relationships had good times, and we never fell out, unless between the former three particularly, it was falling out of pubs. I was deeply according to Clark, were somewhat more impressed by Paul ever since I first set eyes volatile from time to time. Words were on him, then a pale, thin wisp of a boy from uttered unadvisedly over drink, words that the Moy delivering his poems in a whisper were difficult to retract when they could not at an undergraduate reading in a dim-lit be remembered the morning after. By 1976, room in Queen’s University. I could catch says Clark, the relationship between Heaney barely half of the words, but what I heard and Longley had grown tense: seemed startlingly brilliant. Some weeks later I went up and introduced myself to him Things came to a head one night during in the Snack Bar of the Students’ Union, and a drunken row at the Hammonds’ home we became increasingly close friends. I was when Longley belligerently claimed that daunted by him from the beginning, and Mahon was a better poet than Heaney. when I look back now at the contents of the The next morning, after calling David single worksheet I presented to the Group Hammond to find out exactly what he in about 1971 — I’ve just found it online had said, he wrote an achingly sincere at Emory — I see that half of the poems are six-page letter of apology to Marie near enough Muldoon pastiches. I learned Heaney in which he castigated himself for the necessary anxiety of that influence, while his stormy, offensive behaviour. He was remaining grateful for the ongoing presence envious of Heaney’s fame, he admitted, and development of his poems throughout but knew he also enjoyed it ‘by proxy’. the years. I could not help but be influenced. He was annoyed people assumed his admiration of Mahon equalled a criticism I mention all this as some kind of parallel to of Heaney, though he also felt Heaney did the kind of thing that might have gone on not deserve more attention. He said his between Heaney, Longley, Simmons, Mahon, resentment had been building for years …

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The letter to Marie Heaney can be read argued there was nothing wrong with in the Michael Longley Papers in Emory publishing a confessional poem about an University. But Marie Heaney never read affair, but Longley, Edna, and Simmons’s it: it was never sent. Is the archive a kind wife Laura disagreed. Furious, he stormed of public confessional? Are some poets off to bed. more indiscreet than others at what they allow into the public domain? Certainly, Edna and Michael left Portrush the next some appear to have little compunction in morning, wondering if they would ever showing themselves as driven by vanity and be invited back. Longley was deeply envy. In June 1968 James Simmons writes to troubled by the argument, and wrote Tony Harrison, ‘The Irish papers still won’t Simmons a humble letter of apology … publish my poems. Derek Mahon is Poetry Book Society Choice for Autumn. Grrr. Unlike the letter to Marie Heaney, this one Heaney is Somerset Maugham Award.’ A few was sent: it is in the James Simmons Papers months earlier he had written to Harrison: in Emory. More strained relations were to follow, particularly the big Field Day Row, The Ulster Arts Council played a rather involving, on one side, Heaney, Seamus dirty trick on Jimmy — They rejected, Deane, Brian Friel, Hammond and Paulin, when approached by him to back a tour with the Longleys on the other. It’s a subject of poetry and singing — no cash, etc. that could take up several books by itself, Yet 3 months later sent Heaney, Longley and I don’t propose to rehearse the pros and and a singer called David Hammond cons of that debate in this review. In any all around the province — I could spit event, whatever grievances existed between — I supposed their material is safe with Heaney and the Longleys have now largely just enough SEX thrown in to make an been put aside. Perhaps some memories of audience feel mature and sophisticated. those grievances have been expunged, or revised, and the participants can see the past This was after Simmons, his wife and a in a kindlier light than they did at the time. friend, sponsored by the Arts Council, had performed bawdy songs and poetry before Heather Clark’s conclusions are much an audience of ‘shocked senior citizens’ in the same, though she is more convinced Bangor, most of whom left the hall before than I am of the value of expressions like the night was over. Nor did Simmons’s ‘Renaissance’ or ‘Group’. Belfast is a small predilection to kiss and tell go down well place. It is indisputable that from 1962 to with the Longleys on occasions: 1972 a number of poets lived in Belfast. They gathered in pubs, back rooms and flats. Simmons had also become involved They talked and drank together. Sometimes in a more personal feud with Michael they read each other’s work, and took it Longley. In July 1970, the Longleys in. The looked over their shoulders at each spent a weekend in Portrush with the other, and were influenced by each other. Simmonses, where they enjoyed some They gossiped about each other. Sometimes sailing and a day out in Ballycastle. they fell out. Sometimes they forgot why However, after a long Saturday night they had fallen out. They wrote letters spent drinking, an alcohol-fuelled row that were never sent, and poems that were erupted between the two poets. Longley never published. Only they know what they had apparently implied that Simmons’s destroyed, or perhaps they have forgotten poetry was clumsy, and his morals what they destroyed. Sometimes they wrote — particularly his laissez-faire attitude about the same thing, since the same things to marital fidelity — shoddy. Simmons were present all around them: islands, for

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one thing, were much written about. We all Chris Agee, Gearóid Mac Lochlainn, Sinead live on an island. I’m reminded of Leopold Morrissey, Leontia Flynn, Ormsby and Bloom’s definition in Ulysses of a nation as myself read that night to a packed hall of ‘the same people living in the same place’. some eleven hundred people — surely One need not offer the tag of ‘Renaissance’ among the biggest audiences ever for poetry to describe an accident of history and place. in these islands. It was visible and audible In any event, whatever was happening did evidence that poetry in Belfast, some thirty- not end in 1972. The conversations and the odd years after the demise of the original poetry kept going. Belfast Group, is alive and well. Seamus Heaney had intended also to read, but was In November 2006, as director of the unable to be present due to illness. The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s evening was ended by Longley, who paid University, I was privileged to organize, with tribute to his ‘old friend’, wished him a Frank Ormsby, a Gala Poetry Evening in the speedy recovery, and, besides reading his Whitla Hall to celebrate the publication of own contribution to the anthology, read The Blackbird’s Nest, an anthology, edited Seamus’s. He read the work beautifully, by Frank, of the work of poets associated with evident love. The evening was recorded with Queen’s. It had been my aim, when by Paul Maddern, a young poet studying accepting the Heaney Centre post, to re- at the Heaney Centre, as part of a thesis create some of the atmosphere I felt at those that will explore the dynamics of poetry Group readings and pub conversations in readings. Perhaps some day a copy of that small back rooms in the early seventies. I recording might find its way to the Special also wanted to extend that room into the Collections Archive in Emory. And it need world at large on occasions. Longley, not be bought by Coca-Cola money; it can McGuckian, Alan Gillis, Jean Bleakney, be a gift outright.

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