Thomas Mccarthy on Becoming a Whole Poet

10 Anniversary 2010 - 2019 P O E T R Y & W R I T I N G Free Online Magazine From Village Earth Volume Two December 2019 Thomas McCarthy On Becoming a Whole Poet Cover Artwork by Irish Artist Emma Barone 2019 December Volume Two POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net L I V E E N C O U N T E R S M A G A Z I N E P O E T R Y & W R I T I N G Volume Two December 2019 Support Live Encounters. Donate Now and Keep the Magazine Live in 2020! was founded in 2009 in Bali, Indonesia. It showcases some Liveof the Encounters best writing is afrom not-for-profit around the free world. online Poets, magazine writers, that academics, civil & human/animal rights activists, academics, environmentalists, social workers, photographers and more have contributed their time and knowledge for the benefit of theWe arereaders appealing of the formagazine. donations to pay for the administrative and technical aspects of the publication. Please help spread the free distribution of knowledge with any amount for this just cause. Om Shanti Shanti Shanti Om Mark Ulyseas Publisher/Editor [email protected] All articles and photographs are the copyright of www.liveencounters.net and its contributors. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the explicit written permission of www.liveencounters.net. Offenders will be criminally prosecuted to the full extent of the law ©Mark Ulyseas prevailing in their home country and/or elsewhere. Floral offering at temple, Chiang Mai, Thailand. © liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING Volume Two December 2019 Celebrating 10th Anniversary 2019 December Volume Two POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net P O E T R Y & W R I T I N G Volume Two December 2019 Contributors Thomas McCarthy – Guest editorial M L Williams David Rigsbee Margaret Bradstock Robin Morgan Maria Castro Dominguez Noel Monahan Maria Miraglia Daniel Lusk Maria Wallace Angela Patten Mary Scheurer Alicia Hoffman Maurice Devitt Anton Floyd Miceál Kearney Breda Wall Ryan Patricia Sykes Charlotte Innes Paul Bregazzi Colette Nic Aodha Perie Longo Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow Phil Lynch Dorian Stoilescu Richard Jarette Eamonn Lynskey Ron Carey Edward O’Dwyer Ruairi De Barra Eileen Casey Sandra Yannone Eleanor Hooker Susan Condon Geraldine Mills Theresa Griffin Kennedy Greta Sykes Tim Cumming Hedy Habra Tim Dwyer Jack Grady Tobi Alfier Jean O’Brien Jeanine Hall Gailey Jim Burke Laura J Braverman © liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING Volume Two December 2019 Celebrating 10th Anniversary 2019 December Volume Two POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net G U E S T E D I T O R I A L T H O M A S M C C A R T H Y Thomas McCarthy was born at Cappoquin, Co. Waterford in 1954 and educated locally and at University The First Convention (1978), The Lost Province (1996), Merchant Prince (2005) Collegeand The Cork. Last HeGeraldine was an OfficerHonorary Fellow of the International Writing programme, University of Iowa in 1978/79. He has published (2009) as well as a number Annualof other Literary collections. Award He has also published two novels and a memoir. He has won the Patrick Kavanagh Award, the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize and the O’Shaughnessy Prize for Poetry as well as the Ireland Funds . He worked for many years at Cork City Libraries, retiring in 2014 to write fulltime. He was Humphrey Professor of English at Macalester College, Minnesota, in 1994/95. He is a former Editor of Poetry Ireland Review and The Cork Review.Pandemonium He has also conducted poetry workshops at Listowel Writers’ Week, Molly KeaneProphecy, House, Arvon was Foundationpublished by and Carcanet Portlaoise in April, Prison 2019. (Provisional https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas IRA Wing). He is a member of McCarthy Aosdana. (poet) His collection was published by Carcanet Press in November, 2016. His new work, Thomas McCarthy On Becoming a Whole Poet I think there’s an invisible and inaudible thought of advancing in poetry, some- thing that propels us, year after year: as poets we always feel we must improve or expire. This really is a permanent anxiety, a sort of ethical restlessness, that never leaves the poet. It’s a deeper ambition than merely wanting fame, a deep person-centred quest that begins very early in our poetic careers. But by the time a student poet completes her or his writing post-graduate programme, or has attended his or her second or third Advanced Writing workshop at a major literary festival, a proper sense of anxiety settles in. Such a new writer, of whatever age, is a serious person and the impulse to be a ‘poet’ is no longer an idle impulse. There is more urgency and ambition, a more anxious looking over the shoulder to gauge the trajectory of others, both fellow poets Co. Waterford, and more recently at the Advanced Poetry Workshop of Listowel andWriters’ published Week, teachers.I’ve tried Over to convince the last such four seriousor five years poets at that Molly ‘business Keane Houseas usual’ in is no longer an option in their work. Habits of writing and, more crucially, habits ofalso thinking applies about to my the own writing work: life, in recentformed years and settled I’ve become over the bored first with urgent patterns years, areof sameness, no longer with sufficient repetitions to make of formulae the best andpossible poetic kind tones of poem.that belong This toobservation an earlier, younger self. Thomas McCarthy © Thomas McCarthy © liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING Volume Two December 2019 Celebrating 10th Anniversary 2019 December Volume Two POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net G U E S T E D I T O R I A L T H O M A S M C C A R T H Y But as poets we must resist the impulse to write a novel. Instead, as we mature we should be looking to write a poetry with the novel’s robustness and studied integrity. It is possible to absorb fully the ironic injustice of life and aging, the deadening hand of a long sameness, and to save these insights for the making of a very different kind of poem. A poetry that depends upon a form of youthful apologetics is truly dead: I can’t go on writing as if it was 1972 or even 2002 in my own life. Nor can I read other poets whose work bores me. Their work has become almost unbearable and I It’s not that you need to find that authentic ‘true’ personal voice – you’ve been purchase their new collections with a feeling bordering on panic. No, not panic, tryingof poetry, to do the that poetry for perhapsappropriate twenty for youryears life – but now? you Renewal do need doesn’t to find lie the in true the effectvoice more a literary agoraphobia, a fear of venturing out yet again into over-worked of others,poetry. thoughHow is othersthat found? can certainly Where is point it? How the way.can we A poet get closerstruggling to the for true renewal, voice for a lost intensity, could go back and read the astonishing late poems of Yeats, that ideas and rhythms. I close such collections and wonder: will this creature of the body of work that is as permanent, distinctive and noble as the surviving Georgian territory;poetic world across ever once again fertile harvest fields a cropthat areof sweetness now barren and for plenitude? want of new Why colours, hasn’t grief inside Anna Akhmatova: ‘We aged a hundred years in that one day.’ Or the like mere shadows, why is there no urgent sense of plenty? architectureolder poet could of Dublin. turn to Or the a poet works might of younger turn for genius, inspiration to the to inimitablethe filigreed brilliance private the fertility inside their first works been replenished? Why are the new poems inside Alice Oswald’s WOODS, ETC. or Sinead Morrissey’s ON BALANCE. As they In all honesty, and in every case, a change is needed, a proper new beginning is gambol and tumble over obstacles that held us back, the young carry new insights required. But how is one to make a giant leap forward? A new technique or tone from a newer kind of life. It’s a wise sage who learns from the fearlessness of those almost always comes at the end of some kind of quest: one serious accident, a who have just begun, though neither Oswald nor Morrissey are beginners! But their catastrophe, a change of country, an invasion, war, exile, the death of a close technical breathlessness is exemplary. beloved, the banal arrival of cancer, the sudden exposure of some cherished but fraudulent political class – any one of these might seem like the end of a long It’s just that we need to acknowledge the arrival of a turning-point in poetry. The quest and the beginning of new language. But these are traumatic events where young always begin at what seems to them a turning-point. Achievements in a the world crushes our long passivity. Trauma is not always available, and, anyway, poetry that are younger than us can teach us to look critically at our own method and technique. Like the very serious poet who has attended his or her third and quite with a sustained ordinariness? If you’ve been teaching in a College programme or expensive Advanced Workshop, we need to pull back, to draw breath and consider the be careful what you wish for. How is a poet to change if his or her life is saturated wealth of possibilities still wide open.

Load more