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

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, giving 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 poets, 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 grandmother. 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 being 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 culture 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 territory 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. It was a long time in the making and every poem cost me. So I'm fond of it in a way I haven't been fond of a book since my first one.

This interview was conducted in two parts. The first took place on October 19, 1998, in a bare classroom at the New York Confer- ence on Language and Literature at the State University of New York's Cortland campus, where Meehan had given a reading the night before. Additionally, in August 2000 in Dublin, we presented Meehan with questions that she later answered via email.

Q. One of the major themes of this conference has been colonial- ism and postcolonialism and how Ireland fits into that model. Dur- ing your reading last night you described yourself as a "textbook case" for postcolonialism. I'm wondering if you could say a bit more about that.

A. I was born into the young Republic. With the establishment of the Republic in 1948, we didn't the very next morning wake up as true citizens of that Republic. The process has been slow and very, very difficult. There's so much recidivism, so much throw-

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 5 back to the colonized mentality. I'd be part of a bridging generation in that as a child I was raised and educated by people who still had a colonial mentality and all the fractures in identity that brings. For myself and my contemporaries who are cultural workers, a lot of our work has to do with a kind of detoxing, trying to detox the culture from some of the colonial past and find ways to try to push it a bit further into freedoms. I think the big word for my generation, both in political and gender-related issues, has been liberation. But after you're decolonized from one power, you're recolonized by another. It sometimes feels that in our case we're now just a part of the economy of the evil empire; transnational capitalism rules all, OK.

Q. Did you feel the effects of transnational culture when you were growing up?

A. Certainly by the time I came to my teens I was learning more about the goings-on in Los Angeles and Berkeley than what was going on in Ballybunion. I think the first moon shots of the earth stand amongst the most powerful images of the century. That has been a very radical and revolutionary image, a slow-working but powerful notion that we can no longer believe in any narrow na- tionalist project.

Q. Because we're no longer invested in the parochial?

A. Because the earth is just one thing. Obviously we are all neighbors and obviously one part of the world affects the other. We've been given a powerful image of connectedness. I think that the move toward a global culture at its best could be a move away from a material culture and toward a more spiritual culture. At its worst it means whole-earth exploitation, transnational capitalist culture.

Q. Do you think American feminism has influenced issues re- garding women in Ireland, such as birth control and abortion?

A. The idea that Ireland is this kind of homogenous, Catholic oppressed country where women were all downtrodden underneath

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 6 - CONTEMPORAR Y L I T E RATU R E the jackboots of men and the church-I have never experienced that, but I did experience the image of that. And that image sometimes has been the image American feminists have before they visit and complicate their analysis by the reality. I'm from the north inner city of Dublin; my childhood was full of incredibly strong women. Take my grandmother, a ferocious, powerful woman. It wouldn't have made any sense for me to come home to her with a book by Betty Friedan, saying, "Get up off your knees-you've been oppressed," because for a start I wouldn't have been respect- ing her world, and secondly she would have hit me over the head with the book. So you have to be sensitive to the fact that the Amer- ican model of feminism might not map onto the Irish reality. Not that the American and European traditions of feminism weren't nurturing, and especially the work of the women poets. But we were often sold a simplistic take that ignored the strong matriar- chal elements in Irish proletarian life in the city and amongst the rural dispossessed, to use those lovely old-fashioned words-pro- letariat, dispossessed. You have to make a context for merging the academic with what is real. I think that's been one of my own di- lemmas. How do you reconcile academic feminism with the powerful practical example of your grandmother, your aunts, your female neighbors, whose radical natures you can see in the family and the community, but who by definition of some of the books you're reading are poor deluded slaves of the men? You'd have to laugh. Especially when you see some of the men, who couldn't organize a piss-up in a brewery.

Q. When you speak of an American model of feminism that might not map onto an Irish reality, I'm reminded of Rosemary Mahoney's Whoredom in Kimmage and the debilitating effects of that particular book, which presented itself as seriously interested in representing Irish women's lives but ended up alienating so many people.

A. That [Mahoney's book] was very hurtful. And poor anthropo- logical practice. We've seen a similar thing in the Traveller [no- madic peoples of Ireland] movement-people telling the Travel- lers, "it's good for you," or men telling women, "it's good for you,"

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 7 that element of "on-behalfism." But there has to be a way that the process of finding real liberation begins with real situations. Take what's strong in the people, in the community, and look at and work with that instead of trying to apply an abstract program that they mightn't understand or relate to. The debate around choice has been particularly divisive and bitter. The view from the outside might be that Irish women have no choice, and in a way it's true. There are a lot of women whose only choice is the abortion boat to Britain, like five thousand a year, and those are only the ones that give Irish addresses-the numbers are probably much bigger. We live in a time when, like in the United States, there is a growth in fundamentalism, a move that is, from my perspective, seriously antiwomen, antichoice, antilife. What an Irish woman has to cope with isn't a million miles away from what a woman in Virginia has to cope with.

Q. Your poetry includes images of atrocities that happen to women, say in "The Statue of the Virgin at Granard Speaks" [The Man Who Was Marked by Winter], and of women who have been forgotten, raped, or murdered, say in "City: Night Walk" [Pillow Talk] or "Woman Found Dead behind Salvation Army Hostel" [The Man Who Was Marked by Winter]. I'm thinking of a debate in Irish studies, especially in regard to poetry, of what constitutes the political in a poem and the responsibility of the poet to be political. Do you see your poetry as engaging with these issues?

A. That's a bit like asking a fish what it's like to be in a river. I am so far in it, so steeped, that it's very difficult to step outside and see precisely what it is I'm doing. I know I'm coming from a perspective where poetry is a political act, an act of resistance, an act of survival; yet I'd be loath to demand that perspective of any other poet. I don't think a poem that talks about government is any more political than a poem about changing a child's nappy. There's been a central debate about what's allowed inside the parameters of the poem and what kinds of experiences are considered fit for it. To me poetry is a very hospitable house and it's open. It really is. I totally believe in the sovereignty of poetry: I don't think it's history; I don't think it's sociology; I don't think it's any other kind

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 8 * CONTEMPORAR Y L I T E RAT U R E of commentary other than poetry. One of the consolations of making poems is that you're making a life in a long continuum. Poetry predates letters and literature, and I see myself working in a continuum that goes way back into the very earliest kind of community. They had their poets long before the book, before the book as either fetish and museum object, or the book as sufficient technology. The medium might change, the technology will change, but the actual work I don't think changes. And if it's not problematic, if it's not confrontational, and if it's not getting up someone's nose, if it's not annoying somebody, then it has no power. I'm very reassured that people get exercised about poetry. It reassures rather than dis- mays me.

Q. Which of your poems do you find have been most confrontational?

A. It's curious; people read into poems what they will. A poem, "Ard Fheis," for instance, has been read as both a pro-IRA poem and as an anti-IRA poem. A gentle lyric, "My Father Perceived as a Vision of St. Francis," got me called a Papist bastard. The funda- mentalist Christians have trouble with nearly everything. A school board in Virginia was presented with evidence of a teacher's un- suitability to teach high school a few years ago-the evidence was a poem of mine she'd been teaching, "Child Burial," an elegy for a lost child. Was it the menstrual blood in the poem? You never know what'll set people off.

Q. Now that you've made the transition to drama, with plays such as Cell and Mrs. Sweeney, do you think drama is as hospitable to women, or that it's more difficult for women to be received as playwrights?

A. It feels very like the way poetry felt when I first tried to publish-a lot of resistance. I've written plays for children, but there's resistance to looking at children's literature as real literature. Ur- sula K. LeGuin has written a fine essay about this subject. As an audience, kids are extraordinary, especially younger kids-before the etiquette of being a member of an audience takes over. Their

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 9 reactions are immediate, passionate. With the plays for adults, the critical response has been polarized. It was the kind of stuff I had heard early on when I started publishing poetry, basically, "Go back in the kitchen or bedroom and talk about working on a do- mestic scale." I also got a few "She should stick to poetry." But you have to find a way of decoding the critical commentary that tries to do you down. I'm able for it. I mean, I'm not a blushing flower hiding in the shrubbery. I'm not part of a generation that sits around and wonders what critics are thinking about, because if we did we would never have survived. The impulse to create is more important than to be critically acclaimed by sometime fools, what Mark Twain calls the "crickets" sitting in the long grass just chirp- ing away.

Q. When you mentioned a few moments earlier that your adult plays have received a "polarized response," were you referring to Cell or Mrs. Sweeney?

A. Mrs. Sweeney. It's set in Maria Goretti Mansions in a community in crisis.

Q. You mentioned yesterday that you're interested in how the communal nature of the theater contrasts with the individual. Does theater also provide you with a sense of freedom, to be able to work with different voices?

A. Well, I started working in the theater when I was seventeen, in street theater, so part of my work has always been collaborative. I worked in theater all the way through university, making masks and puppets at first. That's how I made my living, such as it was, when I was at Trinity, or when I wasn't at Trinity. For I was a poor enough student, and the streets and the kind of ferment of the theater I was involved in at the time were a much bigger lure and learning place than the university. It's not like I suddenly woke up one day and said, "I'm going to write a play now." It was more natural, an organic kind of development. There's a part of me that's the community activist, that really gets involved with groups. The- ater gives me a platform for telling communal stories, for looking

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 10 * CONTEMPORARY L I T E RAT U R E at the individual in the flux of history. The "I" in the poems can be shamanic and individuated at the same time. I'm not saying that poetry isn't communal, but it concerns itself with the journey of an individual soul.

Q. The idea that poetry captures the journey of a soul comes across in your own work, where many of the poems describe an urban journey to discover or appeal to another, such as in "A Child's Map of Dublin" or "Night Prayer" [Pillow Talk]. Do you think this is a prime motivation for poetry? Do you find that theater work differs?

A. Not "captures"-concerns itself with. The boundaries between the genres aren't that exact either. The poems you mention are love poems, addressed to a companion of the journey. The motivation to map is at the heart of it, as is the motivation to measure, both in individual poems and in the overall arc of the work. The day-to-day concerns are formal. Practical craft work, the drudgery and fun of shaping. I can only really understand what I'm doing formally-I've ultimately no way of knowing what I'm doing so- cially, spiritually, politically, and if I go on about it I sound like a candidate for Pseud's Corner. If you ask me what a poem's about, the most reliable thing I can say is, "It's about a minute and a half long." The Irish poet Michael Hartnett said that the imagination has no limits; art has. I work in theater because there are things I want to do that I can't do in poems. I found it very hard to let in voices of other people, especially the dying young people of the city who haunt Mrs. Sweeney. In the theater there are ways you can let others take over and speak through you, or you can wear a mask. The stories I wanted to tell, or stories that wanted me to tell them, were coming through for the theater, that arena. What could I do but make myself available? Helene Cixous has written a lovely preface to a collection of her plays where she says that theater is an arena where you pity, where there is identification with suffer- ing. That had a huge effect on me-the theater as the place where you pity through identification. And through laughter-for I find I can be funny when I write for theater in a way I can't when I'm making poems.

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 ? 11

Q. Yes, your wit and humor really come through in both Mrs. Sweeney and Cell even though both plays deal with tragic events. For example, the humorous excerpts of songs, such as, "The working class can kiss me arse / I've got the foreman's job at last," in Mrs. Sweeney undercut the overall despair. Do you find the ability to develop this humor liberating?

A. Gallows humor probably. The big coping mechanism is humor. There's no situation so bad, and believe me, I've seen bad, that you can't get a good laugh out of it. What I have loved about growing up in Dublin is the brilliant sense of humor of the citizens.

Q. The fact that women have had trouble gaining acceptance in theater has come up again and again. I've been working with Anne Devlin's plays, and while much of her work is very funny, the plays are also tragic. The stories, I think, are told in a way that couldn't be told in poems. Marina Carr is also telling women's stories in new ways by using dramatic space, but it's still new territory for women.

A. I don't think that as artists who are women we should have expected it to be any different from the experience of women who become doctors, or women who go into business. What's happening in the professional side of the work is no different than what's happening for women in other professions. I think that because the arts have always been considered the forum for self-liberation, sometimes communal liberation, we expect them to operate very differently outside the norms of the bigger culture, but they don't. They have the same kinds of problems, lack of opportunities, for women. You take that on as a citizen and you fight where you can for better conditions. You do have to fight. And I'm not without sympathy for poets who are men. We're acting like it's real easy for them. I think we've reached a time where we need compassion across poetry, more than we need to be hung up on gender. There's a danger that we'll stop talking to one another. I have no intention of writing only for women. I don't even think of whom I'm writing for. Poets like Theo Dorgan, Dermot Bolger, Thomas McCarthy, so many of my male contemporaries, we shared so many struggles, and we share an empathy through our class backgrounds. We're

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 12 * CONTEMPORARY L I T E RAT U R E the first generation to avail ourselves of free education and would predominantly come from what used to be called the working class. So I mean I'm not going to suddenly turn and say, "you're oppressing me." I dislike the polarization of the debate and the simplification of the issues.

Q. Because it's gendered?

A. It seems to be gendered to the exclusion of other issues. While I believe that my work as a citizen has to take on gender issues all the time, I think the spirit of the poetry is transgendered. The earliest record on the island of Ireland of poem or poet is The Song of Amergin: "I am the wind of the sea / I am the wave of the sea / I am the stag of seven tines." Yet nobody knows if Amergin was a man or a woman. The Victorian translations we have from Old Irish always refer to him as "he," but in fact we don't know if it's a man or a woman. It was written down in medieval times, but it existed in the oral tradition probably back to the Bronze Age. When I was talking last night about trying to intuit a precolonial existence, you know, something like a tribal existence, I meant you really need to get very precolonial, get back to the Bronze Age. We can intuit our own past and intuit more human kinds of roles, especially if you want to bypass the nation stage, which I do.

Q. Yet didn't the Irish Literary Revivalists [roughly 1880s through 1920] think that they were also going back to a precolonial past, a Celtic past?

A. Maybe every generation makes its own version of it. There's a notion of shapeshifting familiar to the Cuchulainn cycle. I've come across it too in Native American stories similar to our seal stories, where a creature hides her pelt to become a beautiful woman. Of- ten her skin is hidden from her when she's in the human form, and she can't go back to her real people. She is haunted by memories, by the past. She has to find her skin again to get back. Although I believe that you have to give in to the forces of history that shape you and surround you, I'd be really depressed if I didn't think that you could intuit a past that's enabling. The kind of poems I'm trying to write now are doing that, if you like, on a personal level.

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 ? 13

But I think it also might be possible to do it on a communal level. You can take even the very elements that oppress you and turn them into something powerful and good.

Q. You have to. Otherwise, it's only oppressive, and where do you go from there? Your poems "The Pattern" [The Man Who Was Marked by Winter], where a daughter revisits an image of her mother scrubbing "the floor with Sunlight soap ... / And as she buffed the wax to a high shine / did she catch her own face coming clear?" and "'Not alone the rue in my herb garden . . ." [Pillow Talk] seem to question the function and memories of the past, especially familial and marital relationships. Do you think poetry allows you to reimagine the past?

A. Is there such a thing as a past? Or is there only a relationship with that past? Poetry can be a tool for excavation. Do you dig? Remembering for its own sake wouldn't interest me, but memory as agent for changing the present appeals to me greatly. But you go back before you go forward.

Q. TLS consistently mentioned "shapechanging" in its review of your third volume of poems, Pillow Talk [3 March 1995: 28]. Would you like to comment on a poem such as "One Evening in May," where you write, "It's just her style to trick about / shapechanging all the while," or "Full Moon," in relation to this idea of transforma- tion?

A. I think people shapeshift all the time. It's a natural thing. I know I do it walking through different areas. If I'm in a rough part of New York, I walk like those around me. We need protective coloring. The animal part of us ... the more we trust that part of us, the more safe we are. There's a beautiful story about shapechanging, my favorite story. I keep meaning to do something with it. It's a Scottish medieval romance, written in Irish, about the King of Scotland's daughter, called The Romance of Fearbhlaidh and Cearbhall, though the literal translation is The Death of Fearbhlaidh and Cearbhall.

Q. What is it about this story that you like?

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 14 - CONTEMPORARY L I T E RAT U R E

A. This king of Scotland's daughter falls in love with a poet, but she doesn't know who he is. He comes to her in a vision, a day- dream when she's on her sun balcony. Meantime, the king is trying to marry her off for political reasons. He has problems on the bor- ders. I think it might be an early source for Shakespeare. What I love of course in the old story is that the woman is playing chess with her father, and she tells him how she saw this man in a dream, and he gives her a year to find her beloved. And if she can find him, they can marry, but if she can't find him in the year, then she's back to the palace and she must marry someone her father picks for her. She has a nurse, an enchantress. I wonder if the helping nurses you find in Shakespeare are degenerations of this powerful figure. The nurse teaches Fearbhlaidh to shapechange-to become whatever bird or creature she needs to become, to cross whatever terrain or water she needs to while searching for her beloved. The nurse is enabling, helping, concealing, minding the love in the relationship. It's a romance but it's also a magical kind of story, more about death. The lovers are mad about each other, and I kind of vaguely used it in poems about addiction. When he can't see her, he falls into sickness, a real love addiction. When she can't see him, she falls into sickness. When they find each other, there's this great line, "They lay together for three days and three nights without shame."

Q. Two of your poems have hints of that kind of "sickness."

A. In "Her Heroin Dream" I have elements of that. I've used the medieval litany: "He'd enter softly, in the guise of a youth, his eyes the blue of hyacinth, his skin like valerian, his lips Parthian red."

Q. This story reminds me a lot of The Secret of Roan Inish, which was released at a time when Irish mythology seemed to be especially popular in the United States. Do you think the use of mythology in popular culture will survive?

A. Myths will live as long as they can be told in an unmannered way. Myths are mirrors; the only danger with retelling is that they

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 ? 15 become mannered, and then they are not speaking to a living audience.

Q. Does this apply to the Irish Literary Revival at the turn of the century?

A. That's a particular Victorian kind of sentimentalizing of a pe- riod. Obviously our preoccupations at the present time will be read into them. I've used them in kids' plays. The Voyage is set on a famine ship. There's a girl of ten who has the gift of storytelling from her grandfather. She tells the old stories, and she tells hybrids, using elements of the old stories and things she's obviously making up herself, changing the tradition. That play went into disadvan- taged schools in Dublin. There were workshops around it for kids who were dealing with loss, in some cases of both of their parents, often of the virus-from AIDS-related illness got as a result of in- travenous drug use. Beautiful children of the city. The play spent time in those schools working with the kids. They had no problem with Tir na Og [Irish mythical land, literally translates as "Land of Youth"], Oisin [legendary son of Fionn mac Cumhail, poet-hero of the Irish mythological Fionn cycle], the Immramm [medieval Celtic travel tales]. Nor with the 1847 reality of conditions in steerage. And they certainly had no problem reading their lives into the play. Two swindlers on the boat who were selling worthless land certifi- cates were regularly cast in workshop as drug dealers. The death of one of the characters from ship fever was readily transposed to the death of a father from AIDS. If you present the legends and myths in a completely contemporary read and tell them in a way that you're not patronizing the audience, then the response is very strong. The old stories and myths are about the human psyche. That changes very slowly!

Q. It seems that you're very involved in community work. Can you talk about how your poetic work intersects with your community work?

A. It was very, very gradual. I think it was just natural consider- ing the community I grew up in, what would be called an "inner- city community" now. My old neighborhood was very hard hit by

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 16 - CONTEMPORARY L I T E RAT U R E the heroin epidemic of the early eighties, a recurring epidemic. I've watched this community bury three generations of young people. A lot of time is spent at funerals, funerals of young people. Every- one's grief-stricken, but they also have the added grief of, you know Ginsberg's line about the best minds of his generation? The neighborhood lost the kids who would be the community activists of the future-and if you think of it as I often do in tribal terms, the warrior class of that particular tribe is dying, you know? Smacked out of its head and dying. I've no moral objection to drug use. But when a community is already in crisis, the last thing it needs is the seduction of a powerful opiate. It kills pain, heroin, but if you kill the anger and pain of poor communities then they just get fucked over more. In the prison, I would be teaching the children of girls I went to school with, grandchildren sometimes of girls I went to school with. The great irony of my life is that if you came from where I'd come from, if you were going to end up in an institution of the state, it's more likely to be the prison as opposed to the university. One amazing project is run by this powerful woman Kathleen O'Neill who has a project in Amiens Street for young mothers recovering from heroin addiction, and they have put poetry right at the heart of their project. It's the first community-based project and it has a full-time creche [children's nurs- ery or daycare]. Their children are minded, close by where they do their work. The difference to other projects is it is community- based. The people running it are community activists as opposed to health experts or addiction experts or social experts. And the goal is to return the young women to their communities as activists themselves. It's very enlightened and sophisticated, and it has poetry at its heart.

Q. Are you involved?

A. I'd come along occasionally. I'm not involved in the day-today work. I would have at this stage a range of projects that I have a long-term relationship with. I reached a point where I had to decide to be a writer rather than an activist. Not that they are mutu- ally exclusive roles, but time's winged chariot hurrieth near and I've miles to go before I sleep etcetera, etcetera. I've received an

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 17 enormous amount of support and encouragement personally from the people in the north inner city. People who are refusing to be put down and taking on incredible odds and coming through and making lives and remaking lives. I'm interested in the remaking of things, the reclaiming, the changing and recovery.

Q. Can you elaborate on how you use poetry in this urban set- ting? Do you read your own poetry or workshop their poetry?

A. It varies. I'd rarely use my own work in a workshop. Some- times we'd write together, we'd read a lot, we'd talk a lot. I'd be moderating usually-trying to find out what is needed in the specific circumstances. Language is put under enormous pressure in these circumstances-and I love the fact that it is such a different territory than, say, teaching in the university, where a shared knowledge of literary references is taken for granted often (though even in a university I'd not take it for granted myself). So the real and present moment of the encounter is very intense. I'm very aware that I'm probably getting a lot more out of it than the partici- pants. They are always teaching me.

Q. Your use of the notion of recovery makes me think of Sinead O'Connor and how her struggle with recovery has been so strongly tied to so many of the social issues you're discussing.

A. I have a lot of respect for her, an understanding of where she comes from. She's written some of the best lullabies I've ever heard.

Q. You also have a poem titled "Lullaby" which is untraditional in that it doesn't seem to be sung to a child: "My sister is sleeping/ her hands full of blossoms/plucked for the child/who dreams in her womb/rocked in tall branches/close to the stars/where my sister is sleeping/within her small child." In this poem the lullaby becomes a more open form.

A. Gary Snyder talks about the use of poems at various stages of life: lullabies, street rhymes, rhymes to accompany games. Where poetry usually hits a poet is after adolescence. The impulse to write as a way to get off with someone! Women don't say that very often,

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 18 - CONTEMPORARY L I T E RAT U R E but guys do all the time-they admit they often start writing poetry to get off with someone, sometimes with a poem that wasn't even their own. I wouldn't overlook that mating impulse, the need to attract a mate. Then you're into the life experience, getting married or mating, working, raising kids, right through to death poems, which are in most cultures the most powerful. I felt very early on that the poems I was writing were death poems, maybe a response to the culture I'm living in. The elegiac has come to dominate in the Irish lyric. I don't have a large body of love poetry. I don't know what the use of poetry is, but I know it's there when we need it. Poets would need to be on strike for three hundred years before people would realize the loss. There would be this black hole at the heart of the culture. If the bin men go on strike for a week things begin to smell, but we don't have such a direct purpose or function.

Q. In an interview in The Southern Review Medbh McGuckian and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill commented that poetry does have a personal function.

A. Sure, why not? Again, I think poetry is very hospitable. I know people who use poetry for therapy. Write it for therapy, read it for therapy. I come across them in workshops sometimes-people who would have no ambition to be professional poets, whatever that means, people who would turn to poetry at a troubled time in their lives.

Q. Well, I could see a poem such as "The Pattern," about a mother-and-daughter relationship, as providing that kind of healing or recovery that you've been talking about.

A. Eavan Boland talks about poetry being the ideal medium for reexperiencing. You can step into someone's shoes and look at the world through their consciousness. That's what I meant earlier about the individual soul's journey. That's what I think a good poem does, allows you to look at the world through another's consciousness, physical as well as intellectual. It's almost like going through another person's body, putting on their mind as you

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 ? 19 would a pair of specs. And the great thing of course is that poetry defeats death; the poet doesn't have to be alive. A poem can be three hundred years old, and it can cross gender, class, national- ity-and with a good translation, cross language.

Q. It seems that you're saying that readers themselves are a kind of shapeshifter as they step into someone else's shoes.

A. Oh, completely. Reading poetry is a very active kind of thing.

Q. Often there's a dichotomy set up between reading the poem as a personal story or finding the subject matter to be completely esoteric.

A. I think it's because of the fetish of meaning, that you must understand what the poet means, whatever that means. There's a lot of pressure on people to know what the poem means, and often they can be alienated and think poetry is trying to pull one over on them. That the poet is trying to persecute you by writing these obscurities. You mentioned Sinead O'Connor. Nobody would put on an album of Sinead O'Connor's and then make their students go, "What does she mean?" What happens with music and the song tradition is you experience it, you let it fill your body and your head. You're listening and you totally experience it. But people freeze up when they read a poem because of the pressure to understand it in a literal way. It puts the poem and the poet under terrible pressure. I love going into the schools where the kids say, "What did you mean by this line?" and I say, "Ach, I have no idea," and they say, "You don't know what it means?" They're so delighted that I don't know what my own poem means, you know, and suddenly it doesn't have to make the kind of logical sense they're being pressured into making of it. So they begin to get answers out of their own lives. They can write as well as read in ways that don't have to make rational sense. I love that moment, because I went through that process myself and I remember the permissions that came with realizing that a poem can yield multiple and even con- tradictory readings. There's fun to be had from looking for meaning, in unraveling and pulling apart, but often the process has

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 20 - CONTEMPORARY L I T E RAT U R E alienated people from their poetry. Every student is at the mercy of those who are teaching poetry. I believe poetry belongs to the world, and sometimes you just have to try and find ways to short- circuit its falling into the hands of the school system. [You have] to say it aloud, shout it out, bawl it out, make it into a thing of sound, of physical experience, because then you can go back to the page and there is an opening. Sometimes an understanding.

Q. Is there a poem you particularly like reading aloud? A. Allen Ginsberg's "Kaddish," the magnificent elegy for his mother Naomi. I always feel purged and that my demons are driven out afterwards. My body feels transformed by the breathwork of the lines. I read it to make peace with my own dead mother.

Q. Can you elaborate on the differences between oral and written traditions?

A. You're operating in two traditions at once when you write poetry. You're in a literary tradition whether you want to be or not. It's in the books and it's entered literature, but you're also aware that you're in the folk tradition. You'd want to have that sense of yourself in the folk tradition as well; I would, just to survive. If I thought I was only ever going to exist in print, I think I'd throw my hat at it. Ach sure, listen, maybe it's because I didn't come from a bookish background; they don't have the same kind of meaning. Even publishing doesn't have the same meaning that getting up and saying a new poem does, for me, which is for me where it happens. That's where I make public, where I publish, when I stand up and say the poem for the first time by choice. The moment I can actually say the poem, without crying or weeping or bottling out. And once I say it then it's grand, it's out there, it's public, it's published. While I am alive, the real place where poetry happens for me is with people in a room.

Q. I can't help but bring up the rootedness of an Irish literary tradition in oral culture. For example, you consistently invoke folk- tales and myths such as The Romance of Fearbhlaidh and Cearbhall in

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 ? 21

"Her Heroin Dream," the story of a Russian doll in "The Wounded Child," or the legend of Sweeney in Mrs. Sweeney.

A. I'm just interested in people telling stories and entertaining themselves. I love that: talking, just sitting, telling stories, telling lies. That's what it is. I remember a really instructive moment for me with the publication of my first book, Return and No Blame. I was very, very shy. The minute it came out I wanted to go around to all the shops and take it back. But anyway it was dedicated to my father, and I gave it to him and he was like, "Oh, poetry! Janey mack." He went off and read it and came back and said, "That's the greatest load of lies I've ever read!" My immediate reaction was, "Oh, no! How hurtful." And then I saw something essential. About my truths not being my father's; about the way I'd instinc- tively fictionalized some of my biography; about how I'd never even imagined that my poetry would be read as biography; about how I was a liar, or artificer, and I drew a kind of pride from that.

Q. Similarly, in Italian the word for translator, traduttore, is very similar to the word for traitor, traditore.

A. Traduttore, traditore. Absolutely. We have to be careful about reading poetry as sociology, of reading it as history or reading it as anything other than poetry. There's a great book by one of my old teachers, W. B. Stanford, the classicist, which he wrote toward the end of his life with all that cranky, old-man energy, called The Enemies of Poetry. He was specifically warning against reading Homer's poetry as anything other than poetry, a piece of art as opposed to a piece of life. He makes this passionate claim for the sovereignty of poetry.

Q. Do you think it's important not to read too much into a poem?

A. History can inform a poem; we are historical beings and social beings and we have different jargons and languages, but we must not reduce the work of the poet to a handy example of sociology or, as often happens, to an example of gender struggle. It really has its own domain and does its own specific kind of work. You can read in as far as you can go, and you can hold the mirror up

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 22 - CONTEMPORARY L I T E RAT U R E to your life and see, or not see, the self reflected there; but you must respect what is charmed, what is magicked in the poem. You know you've a great poem when it resists closing down to one meaning.

Q. Right, it could close down the poem's meaning, ignore it aes- thetically as its own artifice, its own "made in the world," recalling what Emily Dickinson says about poems being like jewels. A. I love that. They have talismanic power, a magical kind of power.

Q. You frequently mention American poets-Ginsberg, Sny- der-and certain Irish poets, especially Eavan Boland and Michael Hartnett. Can you comment on your mentors and influences? A. The thing is that in Ireland you're from an island culture, and it's incredibly claustrophobic unless there is a constant reinvigora- tion-not only in the gene pool but, practically, in the kinds of poems available to people. And I think it would have really stag- nated if we hadn't looked over to America, which really has been the site of a lot of experiment in the lyric in English going back to Whitman and Dickinson. Pound's Imagist Manifesto has been central to all poetry in the English language since. Often at second hand. If we hadn't looked over here, where would we have looked? Would we have looked to Britain? Our relationship with Britain was much too painful to be, I think, useful for fertilization and cross-fertilization. But also the kind of poetry being written in Brit- ain when I was young held little charm or charge for me. I remember reading the Liverpool poets-Roger McGough, Adrian Henri, Brian Patten-when I was very young and enjoying them. They would have had a similar impulse to the demotic and street as that of the Beat poets. Eavan Boland talks about young poets finding the "poem in the air" when they come to write. For her it was the Movement poem, but for me-the action was all here [in the United States]. Snyder and Ginsberg-these were the people we were passing around on the street corner, this was The Word. I knew much more about them than I did about the living Irish poets, but then they were coming in as part of a whole countercultural package. "Howl" was published the year I was born. There were

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 ? 23 really vital kinds of presences-despite and partly wrapped up in sex and drugs and rock and roll. I would have thought that I would have been a songwriter when I was first trying out lyrics.

Q. You include Bob Dylan and Van Morrison lyrics in your own poems. And you've mentioned Sinead. Could you also comment on Pound and Imagism and its influence on Irish poetic move- ments?

A. I do workshops in Dublin in the summer with American students, and I see Pound written all over [their poems]. Imagism is so central, even though it's often absorbed second- and third- and fourth-hand. It's still a way of working in a lot of American poetry. In Irish poetry, you take someone like Patrick Kavanagh who would have been totally working out his own take on Imagism. In Ireland you often get-and I think it's where some of the charge comes from-Imagism meeting a strong sonic power, a tradition that invested a lot in sound and the magic properties of sound. So you get Imagism meeting that kind of tradition and you get really interesting stuff. I'm not saying that everyone was going around reading the Manifesto, but we were reading poets who so absorbed him that by the time we came to write, it was our natural medium.

Q. Boland also seems a strong predecessor for your work.

A. Eavan Boland has been a great personal friend and encourager of my work. Most generous.

Q. She's done so much for poetry in Ireland.

A. She's great-much, much loved-and of her generation she was maybe the most politically courageous. She fought the public battles. I mean, everyone fights the battles by the excellence of their work. I really believe that you don't actually have to go out there, into the public arena, if that's not in your nature. I don't think people should feel pressured to become activists in any way, and I really value the people that just quietly work and do their own thing. But Eavan went into committees and fought: she argued, she proselytized, she fought for the right, the human right, if you like,

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 24 ? CONTEMPORARY L I T E RAT U R E as citizens, for women to have more space to speak, for the kinds of and number of grants that went to young women writers, to the amount of space they got in the literary magazines, to representa- tions in anthologies-right across the board. She fought the fright- ening disparities between the quality of the work being done by women and the number of women who were writing, and the at- tention they were getting in the business. I think a young woman coming out with her first collection still has an awful lot of problems, but she doesn't have the same kind of problems as twenty years ago. And Eavan Boland can be thanked for that. She was an amazing member of the Arts Council, the previous Arts Council. She was a great champion for poetry for both men and women. She was very articulate and persuasive and eloquent at a time when it was really important that someone did it.

Q. For me, Boland has been as influential in her prose as in her poems. A panelist suggested yesterday that there is a wide schism in Ireland between those producing literature and critics, but to me that's so much more true in American academe. There seems to be much more of a crossover in Ireland: Seamus Deane, Ailbhe Smyth, Katie Donovan.

A. I don't know; I think the level of criticism is very, very poor, badly informed. I think it's parochial. You try and separate the reviewing culture from the longer critical perspectives, but I find both to be very poor, to be honest.

Q. What would you like to see more of? What would you envi- sion as being more inclusive? A. I'd like to see more considered essays and critical works as opposed to the knee-jerk criticism we get when a new collection comes out. Someone like Fred Johnson [Irish literary critic]-he's done in everybody, but he recently savaged what I think is one of the best collections this year, Three Songs of Home by Tony Curtis, who's a brilliant poet, and a good friend of mine. Johnson has done hatchet jobs on Rita Ann Higgins, totally misses the point of her wonderful work. In fact he's got so many fine books wrong that you'd be relieved to get a bad review off him. Or there's Justin

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 25

Quinn, another man with a hatchet, or Peter Mac Donald. Women poets really upset them. They get all Neanderthal. Then there's the occasional fellow traveler-a woman who has to be seen to be im- partial and not a feminist-passing for white, I'd call it. You're talking about an island culture-it affects the poetry culture. It's very hard to separate personality from critique. But a lot of misogy- nistic diatribe passes for literary reviewing in Ireland. I haven't found much critical discourse in Ireland that I trust in the way that I trust, say, The Practice of the Wild, Snyder's collection of essays on poetry, community, and ecopolitics. I mean, here is a real visionary approach to poetry: somebody who reads widely in other cultures, not only his own, a whole breadth of learning and weight behind what he says.

Q. Do you like to write criticism?

A. No. Never have. Don't have the patience for it, nor a clear perspective. There is enough windy opinionism around without me adding to it. Even now I feel like I've talked around in circles in this interview, probably haven't said what I meant, anyway. I'm aware when I criticize the standards of criticism that I don't read too much of it; that I'm jaundiced towards the personalities; and I've too many blind spots and prejudices. Then I don't expect critics to write poetry.

Q. I recently read an article in Eire/Ireland that detailed which Irish poets are canonized in America versus who's more popular in Ireland. For example, Michael Hartnett-

A. Well, he's beginning to be known in the U.S. He's our best loved, maybe because he's not user-friendly, you know, he's not the smiling public man. If you asked anyone of my generation to rank influential poets, he'd be one of the first mentioned. He translated Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill into English first-opened up her work to many new readers, brought many of us back to reading Irish. We followed him out of English when he took to writing in Irish in the seventies and indeed followed him into the older Gaelic poets as he's systematically translated them through the eighties and

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 26 - CONTEMPORARY L I T E RAT U R E the nineties. He's made many links and healed many wounds in the colonized poetry mind, if you like.

Q. Would you feel comfortable writing in Irish? A. No. It wouldn't be my home language. It's technically my mother tongue, but I write in the stepmother tongue. English is a great language for exploring power relationships and abuses of power. It's been an imperial language, and it soaked up into itself so many other languages. Each word has a historical ghost to it, and it's often an imperial ghost, so you're negotiating a language that you know is founded largely on oppression. But there's no other language I've come across that has the subtlety for revealing power relationships between people, whether sexual, social, economic. It's an incredibly subtle language for exploring those areas of power. On a simple level, at home you can almost tell what a person's background is by what they call common objects. My grandmother would have always said "scullery"; my mother would talk about the "kitchen." You can place my grandmother in a generation. That's a simplistic example, but it's a very subtle language because of its history, I think.

Q. It's marked by class and- A. By appropriation.

Q. Lucille Clifton once said that she doesn't know where her poems come from, that she is almost a channel for them. To describe her process, she uses the phrase "things poem up in me."

A. At the same time there's also the craft. You train yourself to be a kind of a channel. It's not going to come through you if you don't make yourself available to it. And you do this by learning your craft.

Q. Sure, it's self-deprecating. It relegates the craft of writing poems to a natural gift, which it can't be entirely.

A. I think it is a gift. I think that's the way it is. But I think you can learn. It's not fair, either. You can work really, really hard and

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 27 end up with a big heap of obligatory writing. Or you can just be lazy and undisciplined. It's not fair. The Muse graces who she will. That's just a way I have of speaking of her, but I think she's totally capricious. She's blind to human needs.

Q. The Muse is such a contested figure. Do you feel you have a personal understanding of your own muse?

A. There should be a law against muses. They've been an afflic- tion on humanity since time began! No, I think I do. I have a real strong sense of when I'm in the good books. Mine is female. Maybe sometimes I connect to her through men, through the erotic. The erotic brings her around. She's a woman and I feel very, very strongly when I'm in the good books. She's giving me poems and she's really there; and then she's gone with no explanation. She might be gone for years. Now usually there's enough energy to keep going and you can write competent poems. I don't need her to be writing plays. I just sit down and write. I think a lot of times I'm superstitiously appeasing her in some peculiar way. It could be as simple as putting down a little stone or lighting a candle. It's kind of a courtship ritual, I think, and I've just been trying to ingratiate myself with her.

Q. In "The Wounded Child," you write, "First-gird yourself. Put on / a talisman. It may be precious / metal or common stone," and in "Autobiography," we hear, "She guides me to healing herbs / at meadow edges." You have a recurring image in your poetry of a talisman, a mother figure, protectress. A. Wishful thinking.

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