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An Interview with Paula Meehan Author(S): Eileen O'halloran, Kelli Maloy and Paula Meehan Source: Contemporary Literature, Vol

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An Interview with Paula Meehan Author(S): Eileen O'halloran, Kelli Maloy and Paula Meehan Source: Contemporary Literature, Vol Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System An Interview with Paula Meehan Author(s): Eileen O'Halloran, Kelli Maloy and Paula Meehan Source: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 43, No. 1 (Spring, 2002), pp. 1-27 Published by: University of Wisconsin Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1209014 Accessed: 20-04-2016 00:19 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System, University of Wisconsin Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Contemporary Literature This content downloaded from 128.119.168.112 on Wed, 20 Apr 2016 00:19:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 0 co a "^ PAULA MEEHAN This content downloaded from 128.119.168.112 on Wed, 20 Apr 2016 00:19:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms an interview with P A U LA M E E H A N Conducted by Eileen O'Halloran and Kelli Maloy orn in 1955, poet Paula Meehan lives and writes in her native Dublin. Winner of numerous awards, including the Martin Toonder Award for Literature in 1996 and the Butler Award for Poetry in 1998, Meehan has also had two volumes of poetry shortlisted for the prestigious Irish Times Literary Award. In addition to attending Trinity College, Dublin, where she studied English, history, and classical civiliza- tion, she has served as a writing fellow in the English department at Trinity, as well as teaching at Eastern Washington University where she earned an MFA in creative writing. She continues to teach at the annual Eastern Washington University summer school in Dublin. In addition to five volumes of poetry-Return and No Blame (Beaver Row, 1984), Reading the Sky (Beaver Row, 1986), The Man Who Was Marked by Winter (Gallery, 1991; Eastern Washington University Press, 1994), Pillow Talk (Gallery, 1994), and Dharmakaya (Carcanet, 2000; Wake Forest, 2002)-Meehan has written children's plays and two plays for adults. Mrs. Sweeney was published in First Plays (Rough Magic, 1999) and originally produced at Dublin's "Project @ The Mint" in 1997. Both a rewriting of Juno and the Paycock and a feminist revision of the Sweeney legend, the play is also a sensitive portrayal of loss and grief, here the loss of a daughter to AIDS. Meehan's latest play, Cell, first opened in September 1999 at the City Arts Centre in Dublin. Nominated by The Irish Times as one of the best new plays of that year, Cell examines the claustrophobic interaction of four imprisoned women. Recalling Athol Fugard's Contemporary Literature XLIII, 1 0010-7484/02/0001-0001 ? 2002 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System This content downloaded from 128.119.168.112 on Wed, 20 Apr 2016 00:19:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 2 CONTEMPORAR Y L I T E RAT U R E intimate staging of conversations between inmates, Cell draws on Meehan's twenty-plus years of experience as writer-in-residence at Mountjoy and other prisons in Dublin. Her drama vividly portrays the power struggles, anger, fear, sadness, and compassion of these women's lives, many of whom are in prison for possessing heroin. Meehan offsets the play's virulent tone with insightful witticism, as she does in Mrs. Sweeney. The Irish Times says of Cell that it would "probably be unwatchable were it not so powerful," alluding to the play's serio(black)comic treatment of women's loss of power and privacy. Meehan's poems vary in style and structure, ranging from care- fully measured lines to prose fluency. In both her written work and our conversations with her, Meehan alludes frequently to her upbringing in a working-class environment. She seems called to record a Dublin that is disappearing as a result of the "Celtic Ti- ger," Ireland's recent multinational economic boom. In her earliest collection, Return and No Blame, she depicts the speaker's fear of the city's dissolution. In "Echoes: A Decision to Stalk," she writes: I am left with an empty tenement In my old sad city Behind a blind window. I look down On a street where children play no more, On areas bereft of song or rhyme. I am haunted by voices echoing, Voices without bodies, Ghosts of my childhood dreaming. Similarly, the speaker of "The Apprentice" states, "The voices of my city haunt me / But always in the telling hover / Just outside my reach" (Return and No Blame)-a theme that continues in her later work. Her poetry simultaneously celebrates and laments lost moments of childhood, intertwining memories of family members and lovers with urban landscapes. For the speaker of "Fist," poetry allows one to revisit the past and also to rewrite the future. Meehan writes, "If this poem, like most that I write / is a way of going back into a past / I cannot live with and by transforming that past / change the future of it" (Dharmakaya). Yet Meehan does not romanticize or sentimentalize the past. Her poems focus on what This content downloaded from 128.119.168.112 on Wed, 20 Apr 2016 00:19:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms M E E H A N 3 is real and ordinary, even as she conflates personal recollections with public myths. Meehan's work is sensitive and compassionate, often drawn to the most tragic of figures. Her poem "The Statue of the Virgin at Granard Speaks" immortalizes fifteen-year-old Ann Lovett and her unborn baby, whose death at the feet of a Marian shrine in County Longford refueled Irish debates on abortion laws. The poem re- writes the tragedy from the point of view of the Virgin Mary, giv- ing voice to a Catholic icon in a poem that has been described as subversive, political, and feminist. In the poem, the Virgin Mary shows her helplessness, uttering, "And though she cried out to me in extremis / I did not move, / I didn't lift a finger to help her / I didn't intercede with heaven" (The Man Who Was Marked by Winter). Critics often allude to the weight of one's poetic predecessors, and, in the past, the figure of W. B. Yeats loomed large in Irish poetry, as does Seamus Heaney today. For contemporary Irish po- ets, Eavan Boland has been a central influence, one who has paved the way for the proliferation of Irish women poets. Boland and Meehan share a desire to tell women's stories, to redefine what it means to write the political poem, to find, as Boland notes in her poem "The Singers," "a voice where they found a vision." Meehan writes about an even wider range of female figures, whether a poem becomes a prayer offered to an unknown woman walking home alone in "Night Walk" or an homage to former Irish presi- dent Mary Robinson in "She-Who-Walks-Among-the-People." In addition to her literary influences, Meehan, both in her poetry and in our conversation with her, cites the strong women in her life as shapers of her work, including her own mother and grand- mother. In her poems, women are also frequently depicted as warriors, whether she's describing "the kind lady / who became a great warrior in the old days" ("She-Who-Walks-Among-the- People") or recording a familial inheritance in "The Standing Army": "Now that I carry my mother's spear / wear my sister's gold ring in my ear / I walk into the future, proud / to be ranked in the warrior caste" (Pillow Talk). Yet Meehan resists be- ing read primarily as a feminist, preferring to see her work as cross-gendered. This content downloaded from 128.119.168.112 on Wed, 20 Apr 2016 00:19:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 4 - CONTEMPORAR Y L I T E RAT U R E It's not only-or even primarily-to the Irish tradition or her own upbringing that Meehan looks for inspiration, but also to the American Beats-specifically Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The role of nature and Native American cul- ture in Snyder's work parallels Meehan's use of mythology and shapeshifting, which she describes in our conversations as magical, powerful forces. She also lists as influences Bob Dylan and Van Morrison, no surprise to readers and listeners familiar with her almost hypnotically aural poems. Just as her work is at once written and spoken poetry, it evidences a rare combination of qualities, at one minute heartbreaking, in the next, laugh-aloud insightful, as in the dryly wonderful, "Would you jump into my grave as quick?" Meehan calls her latest collection, Dharmakaya, "a gear shift" and explains: The title comes from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It's translated in many ways but crudely translates as truth-body. Dharma-kaya. And the terri- tory of the poems is encapsulated by the title. Poems of memory and recovery. Of going into the body's most intimate memories, often below the threshold of what can consciously be recalled, to bring back news to the self.
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