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JODY ALLEN RANDOLPH Irish Engagements with the American Lyric The Poetry of Paula Meehan Contemporary Irish poetry has benefited enormously from its engagement with North American poetry of the latter half of the twentieth century. The power and influence of that open-ended dialogue are clearly visible in the impact of Robert Duncan on John Montague, Robert Frost and Robert Lowell on Seamus Heaney, Adrienne Rich and Sylvia Plath on Eavan Boland, and in the traffic between the American postmodern aesthetic of Susan Howe and Lyn Hejinian with that of Catherine Walsh, whose formal innovations owe more to American models than to Irish ones. While the dialogue between American and Irish poets in the late twentieth century has been a multi-layered and often tense conversation, one of the most direct lines of American influence has been on the work of Paula Meehan. Over the past quarter century, through six volumes of poetry and eight plays, Paula Meehan has uncovered a terrain unique to her vision: lyric, dramatic, committed and communal. This essay explores the development of that vision, locating Meehan within Irish and American literary contexts and surveying some of the critical response to her work. As a young Irish poet, Meehan found her world by displacing it. She left Ireland behind and travelled to the United States for an MFA programme in Washington State. In her studies and travels on America’s west coast, she immersed herself in countercultural aesthetics, seeking out new narratives of Buddhism, neo-shamanism, bioregional ethics, and holistic healing. By so doing, she began her life as a poet by making profoundly original connections between Irish poetry and non-Irish influences, and positioning herself within them. Her early work shows her continuing these multiple displacements: of city by suburb, of culture by counterculture, of Catholicism by Buddhism, of home by away. The deliberate estrangement of these encounters is eloquently described by another Irish poet of her generation. ‘Meehan appears in her own early poems like some gypsy wanderer,’ writes Mary O’Malley, ‘with a gold ring, a sheaf of poems and the world her rightful oyster.’ Her later work is acclaimed for its sense of place. But a closer look shows that a rich and inventive displacement within it has continued. A small inventory of biographical critical detail is in order here: Meehan was born in 1955 into an inner-city, workingclass community on Dublin’s north side. Displaced as an older child to suburban Finglas in 1968, she witnessed the break up of her community as inner-city tenements were cleared for development. Educated at Trinity College Dublin between 1972 and 1977, Meehan went on to earn an MFA at Eastern Washington University (1981–3), where she attended workshops with number of American writers, including Gary Snyder. In Washington she laid the groundwork for her first two volumes of poetry, Return and No Blame and Reading the Sky, published in Dublin in the mid1980s. In the opening sequence of Return and No Blame (1984), Meehan’s signature mix of lyric and dramatic modes is already apparent. The empty tenement returned to in memory, with its ‘fishbones’, ‘mouldy crusts’, and ‘abandoned kitchens’, is haunted by voices of a community long vanished (p. 8). In Reading the Sky (1985), poems set in Dublin alternate with poems set in American landscapes of the Pacific Northwest, where a ‘B52 bomber roar[ing] over…is as much a part of this lake / as those pines’ (p. 15). Poems that nightwalk through Dublin or climb to dangerous creeks in the mountains of Oregon are joined in Meehan’s next two books – The Man Who Was Marked by Winter (1991) and Pillow Talk (1994) – by poems set in ‘three wild rushy acres’ in Leitrim where Meehan made her home between 1985 and 1989. Moving between barn and garden, these poems are held together with ‘blue baling twine’, ‘chicken wire’ (p. 58), and ‘some forgotten lupins… holding in their fingers a raindrop each’ (p. 63), and darker images of ‘the twisty road that led away’ from a troubled marriage (p. 44). Returning to Dublin in 1990, Meehan met poet Theo Dorgan and the couple made their home on Merrion Square. When Merrion Square was developed a decade later, they settled in the northside suburb of Baldoyle. In Dharmakaya (Carcanet 2000), published during that transition, the backstreets and river of Meehan’s city sequences find a new hinterland in the seven-poem sequence ‘Suburb’. In her most recent volume Painting Rain (Carcanet 2009), written during the rapid-fire displacements of the boom years, city and suburb return. The central sequence ‘Six Sycamores’ watches Stephen’s Green, as if through timelapse photography, transform from a pre-human landscape through Augustan grandeur to the wireless, text-messaging present. In ‘Death of a Field’, a poem set in a suburban building site becomes an elegy for communal losses during the boom years. A child of an inner-city working-class culture steeped in a rich oral tradition of storytelling and song, Meehan came into her voice through an unlikely complication of that heritage. First on the street corners of Finglas and later in America, she immersed herself in an American mid-century counterculture that was ending as she entered it. The American poet Gary Snyder became an early and profound intellectual influence. His regard for the natural world, his sense of community, his ecological activism and his Zen discipline all spoke to the emerging Irish poet. In particular, Snyder’s formulation of the poet’s vocation as shamanic dreamer, healer, and myth handler for the tribe became a guiding principle by which to resist aspects of Irish culture that Meehan found oppressive. Looking at certain poems, it is clear that Snyder’s influence was instrumental in Meehan’s literary resistance to what John Banville recently 62 PN Review 193
page 65
referred to as ‘a closed state’ in his description of the Ireland of those years. However, to argue that a North American countercultural aesthetic displaced Meehan’s Irish poetic heritage would be misguided. It is important to locate Meehan in a new critical space at the intersection of countercultural ideas and Irish lyric tradition. Her insight into the role of preChristian Irish bards, or fili, and her interpretation of contemporary poetic ethics are enriched, but never erased, by her early American encounters. In Ireland, other voices added to her influences. In our recent interview, Meehan remarks, ‘Eavan Boland gave a very practical and powerful example of how to integrate what was outside the poem, and troubling it, with the poem itself. Her way of making certainly, but especially her articulation of the pressures she came under as a young poet has been a huge influence.’ At first glance, the discovery of Boland’s voice after Snyder’s seems unlikely. With a closer look, not so much. Although profoundly different as poets, they can be easily associated as exemplars. Both Snyder and Boland were poetic outsiders. Despite the distance between a California wilderness and a Dublin suburb, both were involved in re-stating community within their poems and re-aligning a poetic voice with it. Just as Meehan carefully absorbed Snyder’s vision, it’s clear that the young Meehan of ‘Belfast Caesarean’ has studied Boland’s ‘Child of Our Time’; that the women of ‘Apprentice’ and ‘Not Your Muse’ have older cousins in Boland’s tirades to epic and lyric muses; that the images of domestic ambivalence and entrapment in ‘Journey to My Sister’s Kitchen’ have precedents in ‘Monotony’ and ‘Woman in Kitchen’. However, there the likeness ends. As Eric Falci argues, Meehan’s stanza forms ‘in part derive from Boland’s, but to quite different ends and effects’. A similar independence governs her absorption of Snyder. Meehan’s poems may reference breath and speech patterns gleaned from the American poet, but her formal choices are markedly different. While Snyder rarely uses intentional rhyme or conventional metres, Meehan has worked with a range of traditional stanzas and poetic forms, including rhymed couplets, tercets, villanelle, sestina and, most frequently, the sonnet. As Eric Falci observes, ‘both the “well-made” poem that typifies much of the Irish tradition and the more loosely-shaped poem that is indebted to contemporary American poetics are represented in her body of work’. But most importantly, neither can account for the extraordinarily original use of a revivified public poem in Meehan’s signature work – which neither Snyder nor Boland could or would have attempted. One of the real excitements of Meehan’s emergence over the past two decades is how little it could have been predicted. When Thomas McCarthy describes her voice as ‘unexpected and unheralded’ he articulates the element of surprise. Her first book, he writes, fell on Irish poetry ‘like an LP from Motown Detroit’. But with the surprise comes the challenge. It is not only hard to locate Meehan within Irish poetry; it is also not easy to see how she located Irish poetry as she was finding her voice. The poets who surrounded her in the 1980s were committed, political, visible. In the North, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Michael Longley were making powerful political statements in their work and, nearer her generation, Paul Muldoon. By the 1980s and 1990s, a path-breaking generation of women poets had also come forward: Eavan Boland, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Medbh McGuckian. Their books and their voices redefined Irish poetry, occasionally causing controversy, but increasingly stabilising a new register of subject matter and tone and adding to perceptions of what the Irish poem could achieve. Whether it can be argued that Meehan herself was directly enabled by this new emergence is open to debate. But the reader of Meehan clearly is. For that reader, it is nothing but illuminating to look at ‘The Statue of the Virgin at Granard Speaks’ in light of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s ‘The Sister’. Or to see ‘Death of a Field’ in light of Medbh McGuckian’s ‘The Flitting’. Or to look at ‘The Pattern’ in terms of Eavan Boland’s ‘The Pomegranate’. Or to re-read ‘The Trapped Women of the Internet’ in terms of Boland’s ‘Time and Violence’. One of the difficulties in aligning her with these and other poets lies in the sort of poem she writes. Although it would be tempting to put Meehan in the company of women poets, the public poem she developed is clearly different and stands apart. Meehan was certainly interested in the interplay of oppression and freedom in the daily lives of women: First she’d scrub the floor with Sunlight soap, an armreach at a time. When her knees grew sore she’d break for a cup of tea, then start again at the door with lavender polish. The smell would percolate back through the flat to us, her brood banished to the bedroom. And as she buffed the wax to a high shine did she catch her own face coming clear? Did she net a glimmer of her true self? Did her mirror tell what mine tells me? I have her shrug and go on, Knowing history has brought her to her knees. She’d call us in and let us skate around in our socks. We’d grow as solemn as planets in an intricate orbit around her. (Man, pp. 17–18) However, Meehan’s interest in the subject, unlike that of the generation of women poets before her, is a continuum rather than a crisis. It was already familiar to her as a countercultural goal before it entered a feminist vision. As she explained in our interview, ‘through my early engagements with Connolly, Sinn Fein, workers’ movements, I would have been … galvanised by the idea of the brotherhood of man … [as] a revelation and energizing force’. And as she goes on to explain, it was the politics of liberation of poets like Snyder ‘that prepared me to hear the powerful arguments that feminism was to put at my disposal’. Also unlike the previous generation of women poets, Meehan does not breed her revelations in a private space. She does not define a self which is aware and menaced by self-awareness, as the speaker is in McGuckian’s ‘The Flitting’. Nor does she allow for the inwardness of the mother’s voice in ‘The Pomegranate’ by Boland. She is clearly interested in a public poem that can galvanise a Jody Allen Randolph: Irish Engagements with the American Lyric 63

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JODY ALLEN RANDOLPH

Irish Engagements with the American Lyric

The Poetry of Paula Meehan

Contemporary Irish poetry has benefited enormously from its engagement with North American poetry of the latter half of the twentieth century. The power and influence of that open-ended dialogue are clearly visible in the impact of Robert Duncan on John Montague, Robert Frost and Robert Lowell on Seamus Heaney, Adrienne Rich and Sylvia Plath on Eavan Boland, and in the traffic between the American postmodern aesthetic of Susan Howe and Lyn Hejinian with that of Catherine Walsh, whose formal innovations owe more to American models than to Irish ones. While the dialogue between American and Irish poets in the late twentieth century has been a multi-layered and often tense conversation, one of the most direct lines of American influence has been on the work of Paula Meehan.

Over the past quarter century, through six volumes of poetry and eight plays, Paula Meehan has uncovered a terrain unique to her vision: lyric, dramatic, committed and communal. This essay explores the development of that vision, locating Meehan within Irish and American literary contexts and surveying some of the critical response to her work. As a young Irish poet, Meehan found her world by displacing it. She left Ireland behind and travelled to the United States for an MFA programme in Washington State. In her studies and travels on America’s west coast, she immersed herself in countercultural aesthetics, seeking out new narratives of Buddhism, neo-shamanism, bioregional ethics, and holistic healing. By so doing, she began her life as a poet by making profoundly original connections between Irish poetry and non-Irish influences, and positioning herself within them.

Her early work shows her continuing these multiple displacements: of city by suburb, of culture by counterculture, of Catholicism by Buddhism, of home by away. The deliberate estrangement of these encounters is eloquently described by another Irish poet of her generation. ‘Meehan appears in her own early poems like some gypsy wanderer,’ writes Mary O’Malley, ‘with a gold ring, a sheaf of poems and the world her rightful oyster.’ Her later work is acclaimed for its sense of place. But a closer look shows that a rich and inventive displacement within it has continued.

A small inventory of biographical critical detail is in order here: Meehan was born in 1955 into an inner-city, workingclass community on Dublin’s north side. Displaced as an older child to suburban Finglas in 1968, she witnessed the break up of her community as inner-city tenements were cleared for development. Educated at Trinity College Dublin between 1972 and 1977, Meehan went on to earn an MFA at Eastern Washington University (1981–3), where she attended workshops with number of American writers, including Gary Snyder. In Washington she laid the groundwork for her first two volumes of poetry, Return and No Blame and Reading the Sky, published in Dublin in the mid1980s.

In the opening sequence of Return and No Blame (1984), Meehan’s signature mix of lyric and dramatic modes is already apparent. The empty tenement returned to in memory, with its ‘fishbones’, ‘mouldy crusts’, and ‘abandoned kitchens’, is haunted by voices of a community long vanished (p. 8). In Reading the Sky (1985), poems set in Dublin alternate with poems set in American landscapes of the Pacific Northwest, where a ‘B52 bomber roar[ing] over…is as much a part of this lake / as those pines’ (p. 15). Poems that nightwalk through Dublin or climb to dangerous creeks in the mountains of Oregon are joined in Meehan’s next two books – The Man Who Was Marked by Winter (1991) and Pillow Talk (1994) – by poems set in ‘three wild rushy acres’ in Leitrim where Meehan made her home between 1985 and 1989. Moving between barn and garden, these poems are held together with ‘blue baling twine’, ‘chicken wire’ (p. 58), and ‘some forgotten lupins… holding in their fingers a raindrop each’ (p. 63), and darker images of ‘the twisty road that led away’ from a troubled marriage (p. 44).

Returning to Dublin in 1990, Meehan met poet Theo Dorgan and the couple made their home on Merrion Square. When Merrion Square was developed a decade later, they settled in the northside suburb of Baldoyle. In Dharmakaya (Carcanet 2000), published during that transition, the backstreets and river of Meehan’s city sequences find a new hinterland in the seven-poem sequence ‘Suburb’. In her most recent volume Painting Rain (Carcanet 2009), written during the rapid-fire displacements of the boom years, city and suburb return. The central sequence ‘Six Sycamores’ watches Stephen’s Green, as if through timelapse photography, transform from a pre-human landscape through Augustan grandeur to the wireless, text-messaging present. In ‘Death of a Field’, a poem set in a suburban building site becomes an elegy for communal losses during the boom years.

A child of an inner-city working-class culture steeped in a rich oral tradition of storytelling and song, Meehan came into her voice through an unlikely complication of that heritage. First on the street corners of Finglas and later in America, she immersed herself in an American mid-century counterculture that was ending as she entered it. The American poet Gary Snyder became an early and profound intellectual influence. His regard for the natural world, his sense of community, his ecological activism and his Zen discipline all spoke to the emerging Irish poet. In particular, Snyder’s formulation of the poet’s vocation as shamanic dreamer, healer, and myth handler for the tribe became a guiding principle by which to resist aspects of Irish culture that Meehan found oppressive. Looking at certain poems, it is clear that Snyder’s influence was instrumental in Meehan’s literary resistance to what John Banville recently

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