In Finders Keepers, a book of essays, Seamus Heaney writes about being a schoolboy in Derry, daunted by TS Eliot’s Collected Poems 1909-1962. “That book represented to me my distance from the mystery and my unfittedness — as reader or writer — for the vocation it represented. Over the years I could experience in its presence the onset of a lump in the throat and a tightening of the diaphragm, symptoms which until then had only affected me in maths class.”
It’s strange to think of Heaney (who, believe it or not, went on to become a quite well-known poet) being daunted by Eliot, given that nearly a century later their contributions to 20th-century poetics would be spoken of in similar terms.
Within the UK and the Republic, Northern Ireland has always done a disproportionate amount of heavy lifting (relative to its size) in terms of its contribution to the poetic landscape: Ciaran Carson, Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Leontia Flynn, Sinéad Morrissey, Stephen Sexton, Padraig Regan…
Consistently, for the past 100 years, the six counties have produced poets of immense talent. As someone in the very, very nascent stages of a poetry career, knowing about the aforementioned poets is encouraging. That said, I remember an experience similar to what Heaney is describing above — of being in a GCSE English class, daunted and cowed by the poetry on the syllabus, feeling it occupied an artistic space inaccessible to me, that I was a ‘pathetic scrambler on the edge of literacy’.
Knowing, as I do now, that poetry as a form is not only thriving, but that the place I’m from is responsible for so much of the brilliance within it, I wonder why young people in schools in the North, with an interest in literature, aren’t being encouraged to write poetry, to study creative writing at university.
Obviously, this is an incredibly reductive statement and, as it has been [exact number redacted] years since I was at school, I can’t really speak for how things are now, nor even really how things were then. That said, I know it was a convoluted but serendipitous sequence of bad decisions, setbacks and coincidences that led me to writing poetry, to writing anything, and I wonder how many people might never arrive at the pursuit of writing, simply because they didn’t do what I did, which was consistently fail at literally everything else I tried.
There is a competition run by The Poetry Society called Foyle Young Poets, which I learned about five years ago — a contest for 11- to 17-year-olds, free to enter and responsible for many of England’s foremost poets. It began 24 years ago, so was in full swing when I was at school, and yet I didn’t know about it.
Something I will defend to the death, during the very regular discussions of class in which I find myself embroiled in London, is Northern Ireland’s education system.
UK poetry, historically, has suffered for its paucity of diverse voices — it is a form largely dominated by the white privately educated, although this is beginning to change. I am immensely proud to come from a place where privatised secondary education is not ubiquitous, but I’m also disappointed that competitions like Foyle Young Poets weren’t pushed upon us when I was at school (again, that may have changed now). As a place without an exclusionary educational system, we are best placed to present our young people with the opportunity to create art; to ‘set the darkness echoing’.
In an essay called How To Get There in Rachel Cusk’s Coventry, the author talks about creative writing as a taught subject. She talks about the mysticism surrounding the question of how to become a writer. “The reattachment of the subjective self to the material object is where much of the labour of writing lies — labour because, in this one sense, writing feels like the opposite of being alive,” she says.
“This labour,” she continues, “which is the labour to manufacture a feeling of reality, is what is taught, or at least analysed, in creative writing classes.” She’s right. As someone who has come through a creative writing degree, I can attest to the fact that, yes, there is a lot I needed to learn, that I wouldn’t have learned had I not studied it, that I might never have learned.
At the time of my going to Queen’s University Belfast to study English literature (I was 21), a creative writing module was mandatory — that’s how I fell into it. I had no prior aspirations, had never thought it was a thing someone like me could do. If someone knew at the age of 16, 17, 18 that poetry was something they could do, they wouldn’t be reliant, as I was, on a chain of farcical blunderings leading them to it and the whole process might be much more efficient.
On a visit last summer to the Rodin exhibit at the Tate Modern, I discovered that the sculptor would fixate upon certain body parts, then make and remake identical versions of the same appendage. There were display cases filled with variations on a hand, on a nose, on an ear. Once perfected, the parts would then appear multiple times across different works — an ear of Balzac eerily similar to one on a Burgher of Calais. It reminded me of something I’d read in an essay by Lorrie Moore on writing; that, as a child, she would detach things from other things — charms from bracelets, bows from dresses — then keep them in a bowl. Like Rodin, she would harvest parts and then hoard them. Two artists, working in different genres, born a century apart, but with a similar proclivity for a perverse stocktaking of bits, bits robbed of their context then harboured.
These habits resonated with me... As I child I displayed behaviours that probably held clues that eventually I would become a blight on the literary landscape. I’d hoard the towelettes delivered to the table in a wicker basket at The Water Margin in Coleraine, liberating the towelettes from their foil sheathes and preserving them like dried flowers.
I also obsessively watched people, their mannerisms, their facial expressions. I collected details, until my mind was like a locked case, full of noses. Who knows how many of Derry’s young people are currently harbouring minds of noses? Might they have a predilection for writing? Maybe. Am I a careers advisor? No. Is all of this entirely speculative? Yes.
I’m not going to say the world is better off for my finally discovering a passion for writing poetry; in fact, my numerous detractors would convincingly argue the opposite. It has made my life better, though, and, as the foremost protagonist of reality, that’s all I really care about. I’m sad for the younger me, who spent years feeling purposeless, and I’m grateful to be able to devote myself now to a practice that makes life seem worth living.
I would love to think of more young people in the North discovering that passion earlier than I did and continuing this place’s tradition of poetics that can affect thought, affect change. Thus ends my peroration.
