Mairéad Byrne began her career in Dublin, writing for newspapers, magazines, radio and theater. Her first book, Joyce—A Clew, was a short experimental biography of James Joyce, with illustrations by Henry J. Sharpe. Since then she has published six collections of poetry: The Best of (What’s Left of) Heaven (Publishing Genius, 2010/2019), Famosa na sua cabeça (Dobra Editorial, 2015), You Have to Laugh: New & Selected Poems (Barrow Street, 2013), SOS Poetry (ubu /Editions 2007), Talk Poetry (Miami University Press), and Nelson & The Huruburu Bird (Wild Honey 2003); as well as nine poetry chapbooks and three collaborative books with visual artists. Essays include “Light in July,” in David Jhave Johnston’s ReRites: Raw Data/Response (Anteism 2019) and “The Shed of Poetry,” in A Line of Tiny Zeros in the Fabric: Essays on the Poetry of Maurice Scully, edited by Ken Keating (Shearsman, 2020) and a poem stamped into the sidewalk (City of Providence Art in City Life/Sidewalk Tattoo Project).
Although you do not appear to be a poet who seems particularly overwhelmed by your personal history, I couldn’t help but notice that some of the poems in Nelson & the Huruburu Bird, such as “Cycling to Marino” and “Elegy without Tooth or Heart,” exhibit at least a glimpse of a longing for childhood as you grew up in Ireland. Please describe your upbringing in Ireland and how it perhaps played into your development as a poet.
I’m so disinterested in my personal history that I had a devil of a time turning to this interview! “Cycling to Marino,” a poem about cycling to school when I was seven, was written in Indiana in 1995, shortly after I immigrated. I think I was conscious that this might be the sort of poem the poets in my graduate program might like. When I came to America, I was writing with great gusto but after six months or so someone commented “That’s the first poem of yours I’ve understood.” So I became more conscious of an American audience.
“Elegy without Tooth or Heart” was written in 1988, in a workshop with Alan Dugan in Truro on Cape Cod—I lived in Provincetown for a year. It was a type of challenge poem: write a poem using as many words as possible from this list of words whose meanings have remained most stable over the centuries. I couldn’t fit “tooth” or “heart” into the poem so I used them in the title. The poem was about the death of a childhood friend, eighteen years before. It was the first time I’d written about it; the exercise unlocked it. I remembered Dugan said, “Put that in your publication pile”. I didn’t have a publication pile before I met him. I’ve never really longed for my childhood. I’ll be fifty this year and I’m delighted.
Were you raised religiously?
I was raised Roman Catholic, though only Ian Paisley said Roman Catholic. We just said Catholic; and everyone was. When my good friend the painter Michael Cullen told me he was Protestant, when I was in my twenties, I thought he was joking.
When I was small I wanted to be a nun. I stopped believing in God when I was thirteen and became passionately critical of the church, and organized religion, I was expelled from school when I was fifteen because, according to the head nun anyway, I had pretended I wanted to join the convent. What happened was that a new wing of the convent was built, and myself and a friend wanted to see what it was like, so we visited the Mistress of Novices who kindly showed us around. Well, I can’t remember anything else. The place was nice though, very seventies, very clean and quiet. I believe in God again now; an adult can be more forgiving than a child.
Why do you believe in God now after so many years of atheism?
Patrick Kavanagh has a line: “you…take up religion bitterly/which you laughed at in your youth,/well not actually laughed/but it wasn’t your kind of truth.” I didn’t laugh at religion when I was young; I was much more bitter about it then than I am now. I haven’t taken it up again, and I can’t ever see myself joining a church, though you never know. I would say that I believe in God; if God is everything I can’t know. It’s a little strange to me how I came to suddenly believe in God after not believing for more than thirty years. It was just a suggestion and I accepted it without hesitation. The time I was in Mississippi was very shocking to me. In the space of a year or so, I got a job, moved to Mississippi with my partner and two children, my partner left me, I got another job, moved to Rhode Island with my children; my partner returned, we got married, and divorced. That’s the short version. The fallout from all this shook me to the core; but what happened was that fantastic gifts came flooding into my life, and spirituality was one of them. It’s surprising for me to notice though that the poets I loved most since childhood, for example Hopkins or Hart Crane, are incandescent, prone to ecstasy. Also, some of my greatest teachers rooted themselves in faith, e.g., Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr.
At what age did you begin to write poems?
Maybe about sixteen. I remember writing some poems—actually prayers—for a religious magazine called The Furrow. My father was very encouraging about them but I had qualms, partly because of my lack of religious faith, and partly because of my terror of poetry. I didn’t submit them. But I’m glad my father read them because he died shortly afterwards. He loved poetry and I think he’d be happy that I’ve made it my life’s work.
Did others in your family write?
My father wrote poetry before he married. He also started an autobiography, unfinished perhaps because of eight children, and the painful circumstances of his own family origins. My older sister, Elizabeth Gosling, is the author of Bivalve Mollusks: Biology, Ecology and Culture, which sells for only $188.89 on Amazon. My niece Maria Scott is the author of Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris: Shifting Perspectives, which sells for only $99.95, and just won a major prize. Of my two most recent books, the first SOS Poetry is free at www.ubu.com; the second Talk Poetry can be purchased for only $10.00. What’s wrong with this picture?
What are some of your early literary influences?
The Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh was my greatest early influence. He was from the border between North and South of Ireland, as were my parents. He was the first poet from an Irish Catholic peasant background to achieve major status in English language poetry in Ireland. He wrote in a wide range of traditions: lyric, satire, sonnet, epic, beat, occasional casual verse, journalism, fiction. My father collected everything Kavanagh published, in multiple copies of every edition, no matter how rare or scarce. I felt I had a direct and living connection to him. As a teenager I read Joyce, Beckett, Flann O’Brien. I was almost as soaked in Flann O’Brien as I was in Kavanagh. Those two did a number on me.
Did you ever have any other career in mind other than becoming a poet and professor?
I was a journalist for eight years; that was my education in the city of Dublin, night and day, and in writing. Last night I watched a documentary about Daniel Pearl. I don’t think I could have worked for the Wall Street Journal, or really have made a significant contribution in international journalism. But I think I did make a small contribution to Irish journalism. When I came to America the first time, in 1987, I left my portfolio in the The Village Voice and immediately got work. I did some work for the Voice but my heart wasn’t in the enterprise of starting over again as a journalist in a new city. In 1988, I worked for the Provincetown Advocate and could have moved on to bigger newspapers, but again my heart wasn’t really in it. By then I was writing the sort of poetry I wanted to write. Finally.
I wrote two plays which were produced in Dublin in 1982 and in 1985. I still miss the theatre and would love to return to it.
I teach at an art school, Rhode Island School of Design. I might have liked to be a painter if I had known in time that such a possibility existed. I would love to be a singer and to sing my heart out without causing pain to my audience. I still want to sling my laptop over my shoulder and jump on trains and have jam sessions with virtuoso poets in bars and hotel rooms all across America. The only other thing might be to have been an obstetrician. But it’s probably best that I’m not.
You have lived in the states now for over a decade. Do you consider yourself to be an “American” poet?
Well I came to America so that I could be an American poet. I’m looking pretty Irish at the moment but that might change. Meanwhile America is good at accommodating a range of cultures. That’s why I’m here.
As early as Nelson & the Huruburu Bird”, there is a tendency toward “experimentation” in your work, e.g., found poems, list poems, collage…was this a conscious effort on your part to render poems in this way or did it come quite naturally to employ these techniques, etc?
I think it came naturally. From an early point I was interested in visual art; also the writings of painters. I was interested in translation and all sorts of mediated work, even postcards of paintings. As a journalist, my main interest was form, the economy of form, how to make form do the job of content. I always liked problem-solving of that kind. I always liked to experiment. My first play, in particular, was a grab-bag of opportunity. I never saw the point of doing things in one genre which could be done better in another. If I was working in theatre, I wanted there to be magic—stuff that could only happen on a stage. The stuff of poetry is language, so it’s natural that I wanted to play with that, to move it around, stretch it, cut it up. Poetry isn’t about something; it is something. So I was always very interested in the materiality of it: the look of it, and the sound of it.
What books have been important to you through the years? What books are still important to you?
Well, I have just returned my year’s worth of books to the RISD and Brown libraries but have retained a few which I’m not willing to part with just yet. These are; The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, by Philip S. Foner, Frederick Douglass, The Mind of Frederick Douglass, by Waldo E. Martin, Jr, Gregory Stephens’ On Racial Frontiers: The New Culture of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Bob Marley, The Marble Faun, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Vladimir Markov’s Russian Futurism: A History; and Benedikt Livshits’ The One and a Half-Eyed Archer which I had to pry from my own hands when I went to Rome earlier this year (there was a question of weight, time, and serious fines if I lost it). Also, a book arrived from half.com this morning: The Academic Self: An Owner’s Manuel, by Donald E. Hall (not the poet laureate). Usually I read a novel set in academia when the academic year is over. This year I need something stronger.
The books that have probably remained most important to me over the years are probably my various editions of the poems, journals, and letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins. When I first left Ireland, I took some books in Irish with me, including An BéalBocht, by Myles nag Copaleen, and Irish language dictionaries; also my Anglo-Saxon grammars and readers. I’d like to read more philosophy, political journalism, current theory in the arts.
I’m not a big collector but I would love to own every single thing Charles Reznikoff ever published.
Some of my teaching stalwarts are Joe Brainard’s I Remember, Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, Jen Bervin’s Nets, Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, Arthur Waley’s Chinese Poems (also a very early influence), William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Langston Hughes’ Collected Poems, Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary, and Russell Edson’s The Tunnel. I maintained an interest in Anne Bradstreet, William Blake, Walt Whitman—and my interest in the Romantics , especially Keats and Shelley, flared recently when I was teaching for a short time in Rome. Also Cummings. And of course everything on UbuWeb.
It seems to me that in your early work your poems are of two types often merging into one; one type leaning toward your personal past (“Cycling to Marino”) and the other toward “language” type poems (the list poems for example). However, in your later work I noticed two predominant strands of poetry: personal poems that take place in a more immediate sense and poems like “Baghdad,” “Trapped,” and “Rubble” which are overtly political. Please explain this apparent shift of focus in your work.
It’s worth pointing out that I didn’t publish a single poem until I was thirty years of age, and my first collection was published when I was 43. This wasn’t a matter of choice. That first book, Nelson & the Huruburu Bird, was really a compendium of three books, and is an awkward collection as a result. I don’t think it’s a good idea to wait too long to be published. I’d really recommend the course you’re taking, editing your own magazine. I’d also recommend self-publication, in print or online or both, and founding a press for publishing the works of others.
In the case of Nelson & the Huruburu Bird, the starker work was written in Ireland; the lusher or more lyrical work in America. I myself didn’t know how those two roads would eventually work out. Eventually they met in the prose poem.
In the last few years, I’ve been able to publish in a more timely way: with three recent chapbooks, An Educated Heart (Palm Press 2005), Vivas (Wild Honey Press 2005), and Kalends (Belladonna 2005), and two collections, Talk Poetry (Miami University Press 2007) and SOS Poetry (/ubu Editions 2007). All that work was written within the last 4 years. So it’s a great relief to have it published. I can see the identity of each phase of work much more easily: the recalcitrant shock of An Educated Heart, trying to address days toppled by the invasion of Iraq and the break-up of my family, as I knew it; the flagrant mania of SOS Poetry; the sustained strategy of Talk Poetry, which may be my Leaves of Grass. I have been able to publish all my work from the last four years, except half a book called Broken. An Educated Heart is the first half of that book.
What I would say is most different about my work now is that I am more prolific and I am able to publish and collect it more immediately. A poetry blog is the quintessence of this, though I am profoundly indebted to my editors and publishers in the print and internet worlds. What may seem fragmentary and inchoate about the earlier work isn’t that exactly; I just wasn’t able to publish and collect in a timely fashion. Things lose their momentum, and one poem survives to represent ten.
My formal interests haven’t changed that much. I’m still interested in appropriated and found work, still interested in colloquialism and the textures of the human voice—an interest in journalism and theatre addressed and developed. I’m more interested in performance and audience than I ever was. I’m much more explicitly interested in comedy. I could see myself sailing off on the boat of the prose poem into fiction. I can’t be sure that will happen though. I love, adore and have total faith in poetry.
There is a poem in VIVAS that I find to be particularly intriguing, “Another Self Portrait”:
pinwheels
***pinwheels****pinwheels
**PINWHEELS!!!PINWHEELS!!!!****pinwheels!
*******pinwheels********************************PINWHEELS!!!!!!!!!!!
pinwheels***pinwheels!
****pinwheels!!********
PINWHEELS!!!!!!PINWHEELS!!!!!!!!*******PINWHEELS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
**************PINWHEELS***********
pinwheels***PINWHEELS**************!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!*PINWHEELS!!!!!
***********************************pinwheels
*****************pinwheels**************************************
pinwheels!!!!PINWHEELS!!!!!!!****************PINWHEELS***********
pinwheels****pinwheels!****PINwheels!!!!!!pinWHEELS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
PINWHEELS!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
PINWHEELS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!PINWHEELS******************
PINWHEELS!PINWHEELS!!!!!!!!*************
*********PINWHEELS!***********
Language seems to crumble into randomness here, but a highly structured randomness; the poem seems to radiate great meaning without using words (except one of course). The poem seems intricately objective and personal…in any case, can you say what you were attempting to achieve in this poem?
There is an element in me of just being starry-eyed and going out and about everywhere saying “WOW”!!! That’s why this is a self-portrait. My own eyes are pinwheels and the stars are spinning in the sky. I once was amazed to see a peacock alongside the Natchez Trace. But when we drove back to check it was a wooden stick with a daub of paint on it.
Have you ever attempted to write stories and novels, etc?
I’ve only written two stories in my life and they were both published. I’ve an idea for a story right now. Hopefully that will be published too, if I write it.
In VIVAS, toward the end of the collection, there is a total shift toward prose poetry, and your latest collection, Talk Poetry, is a full length collection of prose poems. Please explain this turning away from the poetic line and writing exclusively in the prose form.
Over the past few years I moved fairly inexorably towards the form you see exemplified in Talk Poetry: the shortish chunky text block, right and left justified. Talk Poetry collects 60 such pieces. But that doesn’t mean I don’t continue to write in other forms also. I do. Especially the very short lyric. Nevertheless, when I saw that this squarish prose form was establishing itself, I was excited and intrigued. It seems to have infinite possibility. I’m just scratching the surface so far.
What is your general opinion on the prose poem?
It’s a tough form. I love its economy, its unassuming demeanor, its ability to function as a little theatre. It’s very accessible and surreal. I’m not sure how best to read it in public. There isn’t much context for prose poetry. I want new venues, new audiences.
A ruthless question: has free verse run its course in contemporary poetry in the 21st century? Do you detect any tendencies in poets to return to the use of standard meter in poetry writing?
Free verse certainly hasn’t run its course for me. Heck I’m only beginning to learn about silence. There may be people who’ve done for poetry what Erik Satie did for music (Mallarmé), but I’m still investigating all that. There can be something sickening about traditional forms, something tight and sealed. Continuity in itself can be irritating, in this culture of fragmentation and interruption. I consider myself a formal poet; I work with contemporary forms. I’m not athletic but if I were, I’d play tennis without a net. What did Hopkins do? Play tennis with forty nets?
You’ve lived in the northern and southern states of America…please describe how you feel about these two regions.
My first impression of Mississippi was that it was a place of utter strangeness. The earth was orange. Kudzu was snaking to the sky. Everything was alive, especially consciousness of history. I felt fear. At the same time, I wasn’t American—I wasn’t even an American citizen when I lived in Mississippi, though I am now. I didn’t have to be bound by the perspective and guilt of either north or south. When I moved to Oxford, Mississippi, I had lived in Indiana, upstate New York, and New York City. Mississippi was the most foreign place to me. The white women on the Square seemed almost European—beautifully dressed, impeccably groomed older women but with improbable bows in their hair. I was only there for a year. It seemed very racially divided. But it’s a strongly African-American culture. I didn’t have time to find my feet socially: the white world made me uneasy and the black world was outside Oxford. Besides teaching at the University of Mississippi, I taught in a medium security prison—it was my first time teaching all-male classes. I left Mississippi abruptly, when my business there had just begun. There’s a lot of personal sadness in my thoughts of the place. I went to Mississippi with a great deal of excitement, I had a job teaching in the new MFA Program at the University of Mississippi, my first full-time teaching job; I met brilliant people; we had a wonderful place to live. I loved teaching in the university and prison; always there was this palpable excitement. But, for personal reasons, I let go of everything.
In Providence, I live in a very racially-mixed neighborhood, on the wrong side of the tracks, but not egregiously. Both my children went to public school, which can be harrowing in an American city. Clio, who is now 10, will be going into 5th Grade this year. Public schools in cities are principally for the poor; children don’t have much of a chance in America. But we fight the good fight and so far all’s well.
Both my children are girls. I think Providence probably suits them better than Oxford would have. There seemed to be a cult of the feminine among white girls that might have been hard to take.
What do you think of writing programs? How is becoming a writer/poet different in Europe? Are writing programs as prevalent in Europe for example?
Before I left Ireland in 1994, I asked Gerald Dawe, then teaching in the Department of English at Trinity College Dublin, if he thought it likely that a creative writing program would be founded at Trinity in the foreseeable future—there was no such program at any Irish university at that time; hence my departure. He said it would never happen. Now he’s the director of Trinity’s M. Phil. in Creative Writing and the Oscar Wilde Centre of Irish Writing. That all happened shortly after I left, along with the complete reversal of the Irish economy from being crippled by unemployment to becoming one of the richest countries in the world; the transformation of Irish society from homogeneous, rural, and Catholic to multicultural, urban, and a la carte (picking and choosing what aspects of Catholicism to practice); and the resolution of political strife in the North of Ireland. My timing was impeccable.
When I left Ireland, there was a tiny M.A. Program in creative writing being run by James Simmons and Janice Fitzpatrick from their home in Portmuc, in Antrim, a very remote place. It was a two year program, with mainly American students; the M.A. was granted by Durham University in England, I think. Jimmy and Janice were very generous to me, giving me a short-term scholarship at one point. I didn’t feel I could do the M.A. though, as I had a small child and felt I needed to be in a non-isolated environment with library and job opportunities. At that time in Ireland, there was a great deal of prejudice against creative writing workshops and programs. I thought it was mindless, like all prejudice. It’s more or less evaporated now anyway, as far as I can see. People who were withering in their contempt are now facilitating workshops, and there are various types of creative writing degree programs at universities. For me, the creative writing workshop has always been a venue far superior to the pub, which was the twentieth century Irish cultural Centre for exchange. I did a Master’s in Poetry at Purdue University, then a Ph. D in Theory & Cultural Studies: the combination of these qualifications, together with book publications and teaching experience, led to jobs I liked, first at the University of Mississippi and now at Rhode Island School of Design, where I am an Associate Professor of English. If I could support myself and my two children as a writer outside academia that would probably be my first preference. Otherwise, I like that puzzling work-in-progress called teaching. I certainly have known the inexorable sadness of grading; it’s hard on creative writers, whether they’re on the giving or receiving end. I think Gerald Manley Hopkins died of it, when he was a classical examiner at University College, Dublin.
In your opinion, what is the future of Poetry in the 21st century?
I haven’t yet taught a course called 21st Century Poetry but I’ll be teaching Contemporary Poetry this spring. The 20th Century was a very powerful century for poetry and I’m still very fond of it. Poetry is very alive in music and performance, especially but not only rap and slam. It has very successfully made a transition to the internet, where it is increasing and multiplying on listservs, blogs, journals, online editions, archives, etc. In America, there is a stunning selection of small poetry presses; also publishers like Granary which cherish and glorify the book.
On the other hand, independent bookstores have been crippled, and poetry distribution seems increasingly difficult. I’m not pessimistic though.
I think there is a demand and need for poetry; it has a function. Shelley’s dictum that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the universe has been misunderstood. They are the artists of verbal language, which occupies, and has always occupied, human culture in crucial ways.
Louis Bourgeois was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is primarily a poet, but he has published translations, fiction, memoirs, poetry and interviews in over two hundred magazines and journals in North America, Europe and Asia. He graduated from Louisiana State University with a BA in English and was the first graduate of The University of Mississippi’s MFA program in Creative Writing. He is the Executive Director of VOX PRESS, as well as the Program Director for the Mississippi Prison Writes Initiative.
