I'm very grateful to be able to spend time with my thoughts, a candle and the blog tonight. It's been a really warm, sunny day so the coolness of the night is most welcome as it slips in through the window with the light of some stars. I've been considering the poetry of place as I have been commissioned by Poetry Ireland to write a poem about Dunshaughlin as its Poetry Town Laureate. The poem is nearing completion thanks to a few dawn rises earlier in the week but I want to challenge myself to go just a little deeper, and further into context.
Nature and place have innately informed my work, be it the land as home, or the sea as something more alien or exotic. The county of Meath can hardly be removed from the ancient and its ruins, which continually try to tell their story. Ireland as an island has a sense of otherness, and connection with Great Britain, Europe and the rest of the World. A metaphor for emigration that has remained with me is that of a plant being uprooted and replanted in different soil. That plant must really want to survive. Roots, we must have our roots. Whole histories and cultures have been written on this attachment to the homeland; the transplantation of the African Amercican slave, penal colonies in Australia, the conquistadors, the empires of Europe, war. These sea-changes seem somewhat aberrations in hindsight, but what is mankind's nature but to explore and it should be the human quest to not lose the essence of goodness.
Heidegger posited that "...Poetically Man Dwells...", that creation and thought become a kind of building. He continues in an essay
"But when there is still room left in today's dwelling for the poetic, and time is still set aside, what comes to pass is at best a preoccupation with aestheticizing, whether in writing or on the air. Poetry is either rejected as a frivolous mooning and vaporizing into the unknown, and a flight into dreamland, or is counted as a part of literature. And the validity of literature is assessed by the latest prevailing standard."
I would say that this is when poetry becomes an act of faith. To not have some kind of faith is to be too soon annihilated. Heidegger based some of his essay on a poem by Friedrich Holderlin called In Lovely Blue.
In any case these are some thoughts on place in poetry tonight. I am reminded of a project carried out by Maria Isakova Bennett for her Coast to Coast to Coast magazine. For the Aldeburgh issue poets connected through the element and space of water to join around the UK. This entwining of people and place through poetry is what makes Poetry Town such a special event. My poem from the Aldeburgh issue, below.
Trim, The Banks of The Boyne, 28/07/19, 2 pm
Twenty years have passed since I bought this copy
of Wordsworth’s collected poems,
a thick volume used in assignment.
How the words of Tintern Abbey mean more to me now,
in their depths are rocks worn by the river of time.
- But the water asks me to not dwell
in looking on the turbulent, frothing current
the Oilliphéist bound for the even wilder ocean,
on muffled sirens calling me back –
These sacred waters of home glisten,
golden-like pools collect by the banks, coil reeds and grasses.
Quiet cattle stoop to drink past the abbey where I have known
cormorants to rest. It is the heron who offers his wisdom today,
long-legged, once noted by F.R. Higgins in Father and Son.
Orla Fay
The Oilliphéist (from Irish oll, meaning 'great', and péist, meaning 'worm, fabulous beast, monster, reptile') is a dragon-like monster in Irish mythology. The Scottish Gaelic form is Uilepheist. – Wikipedia
No comments:
Post a Comment