Bloomsday; A Celebration of Irish Women Poets 2013

Rebecca O’Connor Domestic Bliss   ‘I place a jug of lavender on the table to mask the smell of mould from under the fridge   while you draw nails to hammer with your fist. Then I draw a hammer , and watch   as you try to lift it from the page. by day it’s Mr Men, Mad Men, by night,   your father and I wishing we could be so bold. you have no such wants, though sometimes I wonder   as you try to peer into Jack and Jill’s well or climb the tiny ladder of your toy farm to mend the roof of your miniature barn.’   -  Rebecca O’Connor Rebecca O’Connor edits The Moth Magazine and organises the Ballymaloe International Poetry Prize. She worked as a commissioning editor of literary fiction at Telegram Books in London before returning to Ireland with her family in 2008. She won a Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2004 and her chapbook Poems was published by the Wordsworth Trust, where she was a writer in residence in 2005. Her poetry has been published in, among other places, The Guardian, Poetry Review and The Spectator.

Kelly Creighton World Put to Rights   “The dream that burst riverbanks held you; blackstrap molasses, antidote for your poison.   Your plummets spraying wetness like a coin in a cascade woke no-one, not even us.   The church spire grew legs, scaled bricks, ran to your side, spotlighted. I put glass over that glow.   Quiet-huff of your refuge, flailing arms, spluttering snores. Ungainly crooning tunes   to the realms of purity; I found too sickly-sweet. You fought the humdrum, from your seat.   You would sleep outside, would sing, stand on ledges mollified. I won’t sing, no matter what.   Float on, keep your whistles of booze-hounds. When I awaken I will join you, watch for me.”   World Put to Rights is © Kelly Creighton , all rights reserved. Kelly Creighton Kelly Creighton is a poet and writer with work currently and forthcoming in literary journals Ranfurly Review, A New Ulster, Electric Windmill Press, Inkspill Magazine, The Galway Review, Saudade Review, PEN Austria’s Time to Say: No! e-book, Recours au Poeme and other numerous other publications. She has recently finished editing her historical fiction novel Yielding Fruit. Kelly is working on her second poetry collection.

Moya Cannon Viola D’Amore   ” Sometimes, love does die, but sometimes , a stream on porous rock, it slips down into the inner dark of a hill, joins with other hidden streams to travel blind as the white fish that live in it. It forsakes one underground streambed for the cave that runs under it. Unseen , it informs the hill and , like the hidden streams of the viola d’amore, makes the hill reverberate, so that people who wander there wonder why the hill sings, wonder why they find wells.”   Viola D’Amore is ©  Moya Cannon   Bio (source Wikipedia) Moya Cannon was born in 1956 in Dunfanaghy, County Donegal. She studied History and Politics at University College Dublin, and at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. She has taught in the Gaelscoil in Inchicore, in a school for adolescent travellers in Galway, and at the National University of Ireland in Galway. She served as editor of Poetry Ireland in 1995. Her work has appeared in a number of international anthologies and she has held writer-in-residence posts for Kerry County Council and Trent University Ontario (1994–95). Cannon became a member of Aosdána, the affiliation of creative artists in Ireland, in 2004. Her first book, Oar, (Salmon 1990, revised edition Gallery Press 2000) won the 1991 Brendan Behan Memorial Prize. It was followed by The Parchment Boat in 1997. Carrying the Songs: New and Selected Poems was published by Carcanet Press in 2007.

Dorothea Herbert The Rights Of Woman, Or Fashions for the Year 93 – being the Era of Women’s literally wearing the Breeches. – Health and Fraternity!   “Whilst man is so busy asserting his Rights Shall Woman lie still without gaining new lights Our sex have been surely restrain’d enough By stiff prudish Dress and such old fahion’d stuff Too long have been fetter’d and tramelld I wot With Cumbersome Trains and the Strict petticoat Yet should a poor Wife dare her Tyrant to chide Oh she wears the Breeches they tauntingly cried But now we’re enlighten’d they’ll find to their Shame We’ll have the reality not the bare Name No longer will Woman to Satire be Dupe For she is determin’d to figure Sans Jupe And once she is rouzed she will not be outdone Nor stop at this one Reformation alone For mark me proud Man she’ll not yield thee a Jot But soon will become e’en a true Sans-Culote And flourish away e’er the Ending of Spring Sans Jupe, Sans Culote , in short – sans any thing   – Ca va et ca…ira –Liberty and Equality for ever ! “   © by Dorothea Herbert   from, Introspections, the Poetry and Private World of Dorothea Herbert by Frances Finnegan , Congrave Press 2011.   from Congrave Press The “lost” poetry of the celebrated Irish writer Dorothea Herbert, whose Retrospections, first published in 1929-30 more than a century after her death, continues to captivate readers.  By turns amusing and melancholic, the recently recovered poems – and particularly her astonishing mock-heroic epic The Buckiad - are an important contribution to late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Irish literature.

Paula Meehan Seed   ” The first warm day of spring and I step out into the garden from the gloom of a house where hope had died to tally the storm damage, to seek what may have survived. And finding some forgotten lupins I’d sown from seed last autumn holding in their fingers a raindrop each like a peace offering, or a promise, I am suddenly grateful and would offer a prayer if I believed in God. But not believing, I bless the power of seed, its casual, useful persistence, and bless the power of sun, its conspiracy with the underground, and thank my stars the winter’s ended.”   ‘Seed’ is © Paula Meehan, all rights reserved. Paula Meehan Image from Imagine Ireland Paula Meehan has published five collections of poetry, the most recent being Painting Rain (Carcanet, 2009). A selected volume, entitled Mysteries of the Home, was published in 1996. Her writing for stage includes the plays Mrs Sweeney (1997), Cell (1999), and, for children, Kirkle (1995), The Voyage (1997) and The Wolf of Winter (2003/2004). Her poetry has been set to music by artists as diverse as the avant-garde composer John Wolf Brennan and the folksinger Christy Moore.

Eileen Sheehan All About Climbing   “After he slaughtered her he dumped her body in the market square   where merchants and citizens continued their trading   averting their eyes from the sight of her broken corpse; the limbs skewed at grotesque angles.   A fly alighted on her eyelid its blue-green body gleaming like a jewel.   A mouse nibbled flour from under a fingernail.   A goat strayed from its pen sniffed at her body lay down beside her.   Her house cat navigated the alleyways of the rural town till he found her.   A rat curled to sleep in her armpit.   Then the last slice of moon slid down from the sky, lodged in the small of her back.   From high in the hay loft an owl let out it’s long note across the dark   and that was the sound she heard as she woke; the sound that led her to walk to the foot of the mountain.   Now she carries the moon on her back and she climbs.   Her days are all about climbing; all about purpose;   committed to restore the moon to the sky: hang it aloft.   So she climbs in her blood-red shoes, her tattered garments:   there is no slipping back.”   © Eileen Sheehan   from the collection Down the Sunlit Hall (Doghouse Books) Eileen Sheehan Eileen Sheehan Eileen Sheehan is from Killarney, Co Kerry. Her collections are Song of the Midnight Fox and Down the Sunlit Hall (Doghouse Books). Anthology publications include The Watchful Heart: A New Generation of Irish Poets (ed Joan McBreen/Salmon Poetry) and TEXT: A Transition Year English Reader (ed Niall MacMonagle/ Celtic Press). She has worked as Poet in Residence with Limerick Co Council Arts Office and is on the organizing committee for Éigse Michael Hartnett Literary & Arts Festival. Her third collection, The Narrow Place of Souls, is forthcoming.

Mary O’ Donnell Hungary   came to me in stamps. “Magyar Posta” ice-skaters, delicate as Empire porcelain, a fish, an astronaut and rocket, a silvery boy on 1960s skis. I understood only difference. Now, flying home from Budapest, I touch the pages of my poems, freshly minted in translation. Now I really don’t get them, but did I ever? The words will make me briefly native to a coffee-slugging morning reader on the Vaci Ut, who may not understand, even in his own tongue. The lines shimmer as night slips through the tilting crowded cabin. Again I press fingers to page, blind, as if by touch I could capture a fish, an astronaut, a rocket, or those elegant, ice-cutting skaters. Outside, clouds I cannot see busily translate country to country.” Hungary is ©  Mary O’ Donnell   Mary O’ Donnell Mary O’Donnell is the author of eleven books, both poetry and fiction, and has also co-edited a book of translations from the Galician. Her titles include the best-selling literary novel “The Light-Makers”, “Virgin and the Boy”, and “The Elysium Testament”, as well as poetry such as “The Place of Miracles”, “Unlegendary Heroes”, and her most recent critically acclaimed sixth collection “The Ark Builders” (Arc Publications UK, 2009). She has been a teacher and has worked intermittently in journalism, especially theatre criticism. Her essays on contemporary literary issues are widely published. She also presented and scripted three series of poetry programmes for the national broadcaster RTE Radio, including a successful series on poetry in translation during 2005 and 2006 called ‘Crossing the Lines‘. Today, she teaches creative writing in a part time capacity at NUI Maynooth, and has worked on the faculty of Carlow University Pittsburgh’s MFA programme in creative writing, as well as on the faculty of the University of Iowa’s summer writing programme at Trinity College Dublin.

• Bloomsday 2012

The Thief of Fire: A celebration of Arthur Rimbaud at the Dublin Writer’s Festival

IMRAM and Dublin Writer’s Festival request the pleasure of your company when the newly commissioned translations of Arthur Rimbaud and Jack Kerouac will be presented in two special bilingual events, The Thief of Fire: A Celebration of Arthur Rimbaud and La Nuit est Ma Femme: Jack Kerouac’s Search for a Language and Identity. The bilingual collection, sioc maidine/morning frost, translations by Gabriel Rosenstock on the haiku of Jack Kerouac, will also be launched. The Thief of Fire: A celebration of Arthur Rimbaud The Thief of Fire celebrates Rimbaud’s Illuminations. Ciaran Carson has just published his stunning new English versions, In the Light Of, published by Gallery Press. Liam Ó Muirthile will read newly commissioned Irish versions. The reading will feature on-screen projections by Margaret Lonergan, and commissioned music by Seán Mac Erlaine. Venue: The Sugar Club, 8 Lower Leeson Street, Dublin 2 Date: Wednesday May 22 Time: 8.30pm Tickets: €10/€8 Special group price or individual student price of €5 available. Just use the code scribhenoir when booking.   Ernest Pignon-Ernest – Arthur Rimbaud dans Paris 1978

La Nuit est ma Femme: Jack Kerouac’s search for a Language and Identity La nuit est ma femme will construct a literary exploration of Kerouac’s relationship to French, to Catholicism and Buddhism; of his bi-lingual identity; and of his fraught relationship with America. The selections will draw on his letters, poems, haiku and novels. Two writers – Gabriel Rosenstock and Gearóid Mac Lochlainn – will both translate and respond to Kerouac’s work. The texts will be read to improvised jazz accompaniment by The Dirty Jazz Band and on-screen projections created by Margaret Lonergan. Launch: sioc maidine/morning frost, which presents a generous selection of Kerouac’s haiku, will also be launched on the night.   The collection has been published in Irish for the first time – and translated by Ireland’s doyen of the haiku, Gabriel Rosenstock. He unerringly finds Irish registers that reveal the beauty of these haiku anew. Like Kerouac, Rosenstock makes the haiku sing.   Venue: The Workman’s Club, 10 Wellington Quay, Dublin 2 Date: Thursday May 23 Time: 20:30 Tickets: €10/€8 Special group price or individual student price of €5 available. Just use the code scribhenoir when booking.   Tickets are available from the Dublin Writer’s Festival Box Office: www.dublinwritersfestival.com Festival Box Office, Filmbase, Curved St., Temple Bar, Dublin 2 Opening Hours: Mon – Sat 11am–7pm & Sun 12 – 5pm T +353 (0) 1 687 7977 E boxoffice@dublinwritersfestival.com

‘There are less Wikipedia articles on women poets than pornographic actresses’ James Gleick

Dear Friends: Grow Your Own Index

Irish Women Poets on SoundCloud La Pucelle, by Nuala Ní Chonchúir A Woman Without A Country, by Eavan Boland The Bond, by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill Seed, by Paula Meehan (read by Frances Uku) A Dream In Three Colours, by Medbh McGuckian The Room In Which My First Child Slept, Eavan Boland Atlantis -A Lost Sonnet, by Eavan Boland (read by Nicholas Reiner) Strip-Tease, by Eithne Strong The Valley, by Kerry Hardie Well, read by Paula Meehan

An Index Of Women Poets A Aíne Mac Aodha Anna Akhmatova Dvora Amir Margaret Atwood B Ingeborg Bachmann Elisaveta Bagyrana Elizabeth Barrett-Browning Elizabeth Bishop Eavan Boland C Kimberly Campanello Moya Cannon Nancy Cato Nuala Ní Chonchúir Glenda Cimino Sarah Clancy Kelly Creighton D Kathy D’Arcy Kate Dempsey Imtiaz Dharker Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill Mary O’Donnell Eilis Ní Dhuibhne Emily Dickinson Assia Djebar Carol Ann Duffy Katherine Duffy Mona Van Duyn F Ruth Fainlight Monica Ferrell Celia De Fréine Kit Fryatt Margaret Fuller G Colette Ní Ghallchóir Louise Glück Eva Gore-Booth Vona Groarke H Kerry Hardie Dorothea Herbert Brittany Hill Sue Hubbard Eleanor Hull I Philo Ikonya J Julian of Norwich L Maira Laina Shaznaz A’Lami Sarah Leech Doris Lessing Denise Levertov Janet Lewis Liz Lochead Amy Lowell M Mc/Mac Constance Madden Ileana Mãlãncioiu Tal Al-Mallouhi Paula Meehan Máire Nic Mhaoláin Marguerite Of Porete Dorothy Molloy Chris Murray Medbh McGuckian Nessa O Mahony N Ágnes Nemes Nagy Saronjini Naidu O and O’ Rebecca O Connor Nessa O Mahony Catríona O’ Reilly  P Sylvia Plath R Mehri Rahmani Kathleen Raine Adrienne Cecile Rich Ann Ridler Christina Rossetti S Nelly Sachs Anne Seagrave Mallika Sengupta Anne Sexton Edith Sitwell Prageeta Sharma Stevie Smith Anne Stevenson Eithne Strong Elizabeth Kate Switaj T Marina Tsvetaeva Mirjam Tuominen U Unidentified Liliana Ursu V Ruth Vanita W Simone Weil Hannah Weiner Dorothy Wellesley Enda Wyley Z Antonella Zagaroli “There are less Wikipedia articles on women poets than pornographic actresses.” The above quotation is derived from Wikipedia’s Women Problem written by James Gleick at the New York Review of Books made during this last week. It interests me as it is embedded in article about the sub-categorisation of American women novelists, an ongoing row about editorial habits that infect androcentric working environments. I have had some experience of these environments, which I consigned to their rightful place when I began blogging about poetry and poets. Many discussions about resolving this issue have emerged online in recent days and none of them are fit to purpose. Imagine a scenario where a woman has spent some years writing about the American woman novelist, the woman poet, the woman editor or translator for Wikipedia – only to find that sleight of hand had consigned this work to some irrational sub-category based on an ephemeral and subjective desire to tidy-up ? One can address the issue in a number of ways : subvert the categorisation, appoint editors to recategorise, or assert one’s independence and  transcend the necessity of endless and pointless plea-bargaining on the subject of poetry and novels by women writers.  I chose the latter route over five years ago and I am sticking to it in the face of reports from VIDA about the invisibility of women writers in the canon.There was the 100% men issue of The New Yorker (April 29th 2013). There is a turbulence inherent in unearthing a viewpoint that asserts that there is a difficulty in our value system that relegates women’s views on every subject to the amateurs section including but not limited to issues of rape, torture, birthing (or not). There are even awards to those men who put words into the mouths of women historical figures. The muse has become a tattered prostitute framed by the self-importance of the male writer. I wouldn’t go to the bother of redressing this imbalance via traditional publication routes.

Transverse threads, two women poets and Homer

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The weft of  Margaret Atwood‘s The Penelopiad is contained in and revealed through the chorus-line voiced by the twelve maids who were hung by Telemachus on Odysseus’ orders after they returned. Margaret Atwood runs the chorus-line throughout her Penelopiad,  the maids sing their songs at ten intervals in the book. I was struck by a comment that Atwood makes in her notes about the maids. She states that :

‘The Chorus of Maids is a tribute to such uses of choruses in Greek Drama. The convention of burlesquing the main action was present in the satyr plays before the main drama.’ (Margaret Atwood, Author Notes for The Penelopiad pp. 197-198)

I am always interested in how women writers burlesque the heroic perception of the classics through use of device and structural under-pinning. In this instance I have been reading Atwood’s The Penelopiad and Alice Oswald‘s Memorial. Atwood and Oswald approach Homeric themes in a sidelong fashion to get to the meat of the oral-tradition. Their poetic focus is decidedly on the lament. Atwood gives voice to the subversive and unquiet maids of The Odyssey. Oswald creates a dirge through interweaving the names of  fallen warriors of The Iliad. Both Atwood and Oswald use the lament as the kernel for their thematic variations from and approaches to Homeric mythos. The poets use repetition to add texture to their laments thereby shaping and focusing the small forgotten voice  toward expressing a universal grief.  This is a not heroic poetry, it is a poetry of keening and loss.

Oswald’s Memorial has drawn quite divided critique. I mention in particular Jason Guriel‘s  reductionistic approach to the book in which he refers to it as ‘a rose-fingered yawn’. This slighting throwaway remark does little to evoke interest in how women poets actually write, nor does it sufficiently disguise Guriel’s critical-ennui. I would point the general poetic-reader to Michael Lista’s critique of Memorial in order to garner a more balanced view of the work.

Atwood’s twelve maids defiantly do not not burlesque the main action of The Penelopiad. They are the main action of the book. Penelope reveals herself to be a tedious bore whose lack of wit and guile are vaguely repellent. I wanted Atwood to get her toe out of the water and focus on the maids who enliven the text with their songs and shantys.  The central pivot of The Penelopiad revolves round the nasty relation between Penelope and Helen rather than on the texturing of the maid’s burlesquing. In this, Atwood’s approach to Homer is a bit of a missed opportunity. The strength of the book is in its sub-theme which Atwood had not developed into a  fuller rendering. 

Oswald did not make a similar mistake in her approach to Homer’s The Iliad.  She has broken-down the book and re-made it a powerful dirge. The fact that this has led to an inability by her critics to get to what she is doing only strengthens the work in my view. The index for Memorial comprises an unnumbered litany of names from The Iliad. Oswald weaves their names into the text whilst interspersing their histories with individual laments for the warrior-groupings. These laments vary in length , they are devices to allow the mourning voice through. They are not separate to the main action of the book but are organically interleaved into and caught up in the theme and direction of this epic poem-dirge.

‘Like a man put a wand of olive in the earth And watered it and that wand became a wave It became a whip a spine a crown it became a wind-dictionary It could speak in tongues It became a wobbling wagon-load of flowers And then a storm came spinning by And it became a broken tree uprooted It became a wood pile in a lonely field. Like a man put a wand of olive in the earth And watered it and that wand became a wave It became a whip a spine a crown it became a wind-dictionary It could speak in tongues It became a wobbling wagon-load of flowers And then a storm came spinning by And it became a broken tree uprooted It became a wood pile in a lonely field.’ Page 31, Memorial, by Alice Oswald

It interests me that contemporary women poets are approaching Homer through the use of the lament. They are voicing the silent mourning that occurs when the glory of battle is over. Atwood is giving voice to the abused girls whose life-experience is of enslavement and of mis-use. Oswald does not state that the mourning voice in Memorial is that of a woman, but the cadence of the mourning poems that intersperse her text suggests the chorus, the lament.

In terms of contrast in poetic approaches to direct  engagement with classical literature, one could point to how Ted Hughes re-told the twenty-four Tales From Ovid (Metamorphosis) or look at Heaney’s Beowulf. The fact that critique ignores the poetic engagement of women with the classics of literature only points to critical-disengagement, or at best to a narrow conservatism. It is time that The Chorus (that most pertinent part of Epic) is re-read, and given its place in the overall texturing of great poetic works. What would T.S Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral be without the integrity of the women’s voices?

‘…he took a cable which had seen service on a blue-bowed ship, made one end fast to a high column in the portico, and threw the other over the round-house, high-up, so that their feet would not touch the ground. As when the long-winged thrushes or doves get tangled in a snare…so the women’s heads were held fast in a row, with nooses round their necks, to bring them to the most pitiable end. For a little while their feet twitched, but not for very long.’ The Odyssey, Book 22 (470473)

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• The Killing of The Suitors
• Jason Guriel on Oswald
• Michael Lista on Oswald
• My Blog on Critique

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Transverse threads, women poets and Homer by C. Murray is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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Veracity and Other Stories, poems by Sarah Clancy

Thanks For Nothing Hippies, 2012. Sarah Clancy

The following two poems are by Sarah Clancy  from a forthcoming collection of prose and poetry, called Friction.

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Veracity and other stories   for Alice Kennelly   I’ve lived in four different decades today stepped onto three continents I took no visas no tickets no passports I wrote my own bill of passage I forged it and what of my fraud if it served us?   I inhabited flesh that wasn’t my own I scratched it kneaded stiff shoulders with hands that emerged from some other wrists some forearms some oxters then I left it   I walked from it and encountered new bones new ligaments new eyes with which I saw what I wanted I decided you were an abstraction so I tried to walk through you but couldn’t I put my palm on your chest but it met with resistance I got caught in your substance   then fuck it I lied about it said you meant nothing that your whole existence was a blip a pot-hole that no-one was fixing and I burst a tyre or might have I buckled my wheel rims in it didn’t I? but then I gunned it and drove on   I read my old diaries as page turners with no idea what might happen from one page to the next I took guesses blind stabs at historic events to see if it seemed like they’d happened me then whatever I remembered what I wanted even if I had to invent it I swore it as fact rose to my feet to defend it   it was my truth in that moment and there wasn’t a chance I’d let it be rebutted and as a result I found myself heartless my past cast off all reinvented and I liked it I was made light by it   and as to the future all those futures I’m writing I’m telling you I’ll inhabit several actions at once and believe what I want I’ll pay no dues to this fiction this tyrant this actual bastard reality? I’m over it.   ©Sarah Clancy January 2013   Gullible.   I met the take-it back man down in the shopping centre where he was soap boxing, waxing lyrical and I drank his potion. It was said that it could cure the worst of all the words you’d ever spewed out in fury or in disappointment and if a cure was beyond the bounds of either language or elixirs it could reclaim the offending utterances and put them in storage so long as you swallowed and didn’t spit that is. It could make happenstances fall from their standing, go over old ground and make it new sown, it could undo the damage sharp tongues had inflicted on the unsuspecting, the suspicious and the blameless. It could pale the blushes from stupid outbursts, cool them before they ever hit your cheekbones – if that is you took just two small mouthfuls and vowed to stay quiet for the duration of its troubled ingestion. It could banish shame before it ever caught your tonsils and traipsed its way down your resistant gullet I know it sounds far-fetched but I for one swallowed it.   ©Sarah Clancy November 2012