NOTES: POETRY M.A. THESIS
for Swan
1.
POETS HOUSE
ADRIAN FOX
CRAIGAVON,
CO, ARMAGH
N,IRELAND
BT655AF
"where water comes together with
with other water"
PATRICK KAVANAGH AND RAYMOND CARVER
for Swan
In this thesis, I hope to link the streams of poetry from the Grand Canal, Dublin and the rivers that flow through Port Angelus, Washington state, Carver and Kavanagh country. Those last lines from a Carver poem, “where water comes together with other water” for me depicts Patrick Kavanagh’s Grand Canal Bank” and Raymond Carver’s, A new path to the waterfall, as well as showing me here, the link on the shores of their streams of poetry: "loving them all back to the source./ loving everything that increases me". Both these selections of poetry were written in the last years of the poet's lives, and as Carvers wife, the poet Tess Gallagher says in the introduction to, A new path to the waterfall:
This is a last book and last things as we learn, have rights of their own, they don’t need us, but in our need of them, we commemorate and make more real that finality which encircles us and draws again into that central question, what is life for?
For me, Raymond Carver and Patrick Kavanagh wrote their answer. me, being the link here bringing the similarities of these great poets together in this thesis. I would like to tell you about myself and why I want to be a poet.
There is something un-explainable about the cycle of the tides. As long as I can remember I have had a strange unfearful love of water, Maybe its because I am a Pisces or maybe it started when I was a young boy seeing my reflection in the sky in puddles on dark roads. The flow of water is poetry, a Heraclitus flow, Its movement is indefinable. As Louis Mc Neice said poets don’t know (exactly) what they are doing if they did it wouldn’t be done. 2.
Like me becoming a poet its un-explainable, Being the first in my family tree that I know of to put pen to paper and want it to be more than just a scrap of paper that rots at the bottom of a drawer. I think my poetic mind was being formed at an early age. Poetry washes over me like a beautiful horrific incident that occurred when I was a boy holidaying in Cushendall, on the Antrim coastline. I ran excited towards the shoreline with temporary freedom, away for a time at least from the restrictions of childhood, the troubles placed on almost every child growing up in Belfast, during the early seventies. Before I reached the tide I slipped on a patch of moss growing on the edge of a tiny rowing-boat port and went cascading into the sea.
I don’t know exactly how long I was in the water but it seemed like time stopped. At first, I struggled for my life attempting to grasp the air above the flowing tides, suddenly I became exhausted and gave up the fight, it was within those tiny instances that I noticed just how beautiful it was, it was as if I saw myself dancing in the womb of aquamarine.
2. Louis Mac Neice, Selected Literary Criticism, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1987, p.10.
The colors were amazing, so diverse like being caught in a rainbow almost perfectly still. a brave American tourist dived in and dragged me from the water, pumped the sea from my lungs and gave me the kiss of life. who or where ever you are I'm very grateful.
I think this one of the many experiences of tragic beauty that makes me want to be a poet, to be able to use language to explain this emotion, I had never seen anything as amazing as this in life until I had the privilege to witness the birth of my sons.
"It's the kind of influence that is common to us and as natural as rain-water and after a list of great writers such as Durrell, Hemingway, Miller, Flannery O' Connor, Chekhov and of course his teacher John Gardener, he goes on to finish the essay with: but my children are it, theirs is the main influence. They were the prime movers and shakers of my life and my writing. As you see, I'm still under their influence, though the days are relatively clear now, and the silences are right. 3.
When I began to delve into the diverse reservoir of poetry and read so many great poets, Lowell, Bishop, Plath, Kavanagh, and Carver to mention but a few, I realized that that strange feeling I was trying to convey was a universal one in the field of poetry.
3.Raymond Carvers, "Fires", Essays, Poems, Stories, Picador, 1986.
The emotion of all the senses being brought together on the blank page, before I go on to tell you about these two great poets that
have influenced the first instances of me becoming a privileged apprentice poet. I was born in Kent, England of Irish parents my mother from Rathmines, Co, Dublin and my father from Ardoyne in North Belfast. I was six when my parents decided to move back to Northern Ireland and start a new life. The year was nineteen-sixty-seven, the year Patrick Kavanagh died. My parents were not to know that in just two years, the new-start they planned would be caught up in the nightmare we call the troubles.
My fathers small business, a garage and showroom for used cars would be taken over and used as a sentry post by the British army
and we would be put out of our home and it was burnt to the ground, without any form of compensation for either loss.
The savings they worked for in England vanished in the flare of a petrol bomb through the window of our home. Those were strange
stressful times, turbulent days. In nineteen seventy-three or four, my parents had the good sense to take us away from the madness of Northern Ireland and move the family home to the Republic. My father purchased a little cottage in Hackballscross seven miles from Dundalk, just a stone's throw away from Kavanagh's birth-
place, Mucker townland, Inneskeen.
There was no electricity or running water, not that it mattered. There was freedom and poetry everywhere, I didn't know what poetry was back then but I know that nature embraced me and
took from me the wild bitterness that was stored in my mind from all those years of mayhem in Belfast. I wasn't until I was much older and had a family of my that I began to appreciate
my time spent in that wonderful place. When I began to read poetry especially Kavanagh, I related that sense of freedom I had playing in those fields around that little cottage. Kavanagh's work especially his early poems, for example, the end of the poem Inniskeen Road: "I am the king of banks streams and every blooming thing". 4.
I can relate to Kavanagh's work because like me there nothing deliberate or conscious about his poetic beginnings, he made poetry accessible to the likes of me who left school early with basic
education. I came to poetry late as the only books in my home were the Secret Army and Michael Collins and books on Hollywood. My father used the bullet I used the pen to become a peace poet. That little cottage took the hatred from my heart, I think Kavanagh's spirit is in me, the grass was cool around my ankles. "On school book poetry", he wrote quoting Longfellow, "How strange things happen to a man / he dabbles in something and does / not realize that it is his life". My love poetry gives me the right to want to be a good poet. It was Patrick Kavanagh and Raymond Carver that gave me the confidence to stand up and be counted in this world of wonder, that un-explainable power that can be glimpsed at through poetry.
After my wife bought me Kavanagh's complete poems, I began
to realize that a lot of the last poems were loose, some would say
scrappy in places but for me, that was the beauty. I could see the progress in his work which gave me as an apprentice poet a better insight into the man and the inspiration behind the poems.
Patrick Kavanagh, "The complete poems", Goldsmith Press Ltd
s
I came across Carver's poetry and prose from a friend, we sat drinking coffee in the tiny study I had converted from a spare
box room. We spoke of writers and literature like we used to talk of music and songwriters, the music during this time was stale no longer exciting us like it did in the late seventies and early eighties
and so we turned to poetry and prose for inspiration, not that we had any qualifications on the subject but there we were locked in conversation. He reached into the inside pocket of his winter coat and handed me a book and a single sheet of paper, "Fires" was the title, by Raymond Carver. I placed the book on my desk as my friend spoke passionately as I unfolded the sheet of paper,"
"There are essays on writing and poems you'll relate to, he makes poetry accessible". On the sheet of paper was a poem was written by him for me it read:
MAGIC
Subdued light falls gently
upon your manuscripts
you sit beneath the window
with the pages of your story
scattered as you shape and cut
with ink a truth your truth
the children are asleep
and you sit silent smoking
a roll your own cigarette
you can almost hear it
the river that runs through
the council estate
the cities
the countries
the pure waters
outside stationary cars rusting
empty streets a wind growing stronger
he threat of rain
you lift your pen
and begin to write.
(John Corvan)
WOW!, I was floored, when I finished reading the poem. I knew all those hours in my tiny study trying to form my words into
some kind of coherent structure. I knew then I was on the right track. He wrote this before I studied poetry before I received
my M.A. in creative writing, it is what the poem is magic, a Carveresque tribute from a true friend, you cant get better friendship than this, the power of Raymond Carver. No one knew me like Swan as I called him. I thanked him, who told me the poem would be published in an anthology, no one had ever written a poem for me, it was a mighty fine poem.
It was as if I had received a great gift, it was like an M.A, or publication before an M.A., publication, wow he knew. That
poem created a bond that will last forever and that tiny book that sat on my desk piled under books I was trying to read at the time that meager and unimportant book beside well-bound books of world-renowned authors such as Joyce's, Dubliners, Yeates, Selected poems and O' Flaherty's Black Soul. Like the poem and that little paperback was to make a huge impact on me.
For weeks that book lay on my desk while I pondered the other texts, it wasn't that I didn't value my friends advice, but this was the early years of getting into reading after a lapse of factory work, domestic bliss, and responsibility, I was trying to form my own footing through a journey of self-learning, much like I think carver did in his early years, before he received recognition for his work.
And so the book lay there as great books do, I was in no hurry I had plenty of time. For once in my life I was doing what I wanted, I told my wife I am not going back to work wanted to be a writer. I told her it might take two years to get published, it took six. all my family friends thought I was nuts, that's why that poem of swans means so much to me, he was the only one that knew, thanks mate.
I was unemployed and glad to be Maggie Thatcher done me a favor, most days I went to the library as long as my children were ok, they seemed happy well-dressed food in our bellies a roof over our head, what more do you want, I was never money-oriented
capitalism eats your sense of self. I was great not having a boss leering over my shoulder, sapping my energies and making a tidy profit.
One night I sat up late, my wife and children in bed deep in slumber, I picked the book from the pile and began to flick through
th essays and my thumb worked through the sections of poetry waiting for something to catch my eye. I stopped at the last section of poems, Poem for Karl Wallenda, Aerialist Supreme, the first lines caught me:
"When you were little, wind tailed you
all over Magdeburg. In Vienna wind looked for you
in first one courtyard then another
it overturned fountains, it made your hair stand on end."
By the time I had read the fourth line, it seemed I was in the poem and my hair stood on end, I was hooked on the tightrope of Carvers words. I traveled all around the world with the poem: with Haile Selassie / with the king of the Belgians / wind rolled mangos and garbage sacks down the streets of Nairobi / across the Serengetti plain / over the houses in Florida / south to Havana /Puerto Rico and the torrid zone / 74 years old and ten flights up, the wind threw itself at you like a young lover.
"your hair stands on end.
you crouch, to reach the wire"
Suddenly I had lost my balance on the page and had to reach for the next line but it was too late. The poem was over and Karl Wallenda was being cleaned from the sidewalk, and those last lines clung to me.
later men came along to clean up
and take down the wire. they
take down the wire where you spent
your life, imagine that wire" 5.
where you spent your life
As I neared the poem's end. The poem had caught my breath and my heart began to pump and heave, it was as if I caught the breath of Carver when he was writing it, a poem written in America caught your breath in Ireland, a poem had never done this to me before.
Imagine that wire?
5. Carver, "Fires", Poem for Karl Wallenda, Aerialist Supreme.
I didn't believe there was such a voice out there that could reach me with such might such strength and clarity. From that reading of one poem I was held by the power of poetry, held by the high winded power of words, with that same force that held a tight rope walker above the earth. With the confirmation of my friend's poem and the breath of Raymond Carver,
I was sky-walking on a tightrope of poetry.
I closed the book and threw my eyes over the blurbs, not that I believe the blurbs of any book but I did believe what I just read. I read the first few lines of one from, The New Statesman, and that was enough for me, "Carver is a master."
My heart began to fade back into the atmosphere of my own world, I placed the book down and sat back in my chair, pondering on the wind that wafted in the cuffs of Karl Wallenda
"Magic", I thought. As I began to read all of the book. The first lines of the essay "Fires" which I will repeat because I think they are so relevant to the links I am trying to convey in this thesis: "Influences are forces circumstances, personalities,
irresistible as the tide. Its kind of influence are forces circumstances that is as common to us, and as natural, as rainwater.
Carver's words are rivers of literature flowing to the sea where the world looks on amazed at such beauty. As he states in the poem"Sunday Night"." Make use of the things around you / this light rain outside the window for one." 6.
He has taken the image of a tiny droplet and created a new path to the waterfall.
6. Raymond Carver, "A new path to the waterfall, COLLINS Hharvillm 1990.
Its this book, "A new path to the waterfall", I wish to address in this thesis, the beauty of death and what we can achieve in our last days gripped by disease, not because it is his best because all Carvers work is part of the magnificent journey of a great writer.
As Salman Rushdi, says "Raymond Carver was a great writer,
read it, read everything Carver wrote".
I don't believe in the afterlife but I do believe in the spirit of man, and this book is the end of the journey for Carver, and so his spirit is here with me bound in the gift he has left us to read.
this might sound windy and over-blown, as my mentor James Simmons stated but this is exactly how I feel.
As Ezra pound said, "the fundamental accuracy of statement is the one sole morality of writing", this is mine. I Cling to Carvers work as a role model because his life and his work, like Kavanagh's, can be placed in the same context, gives me who had not much education a lot of hope and scope for the future. Like Carver, I hadn't much interesting school and couldn't wait to get out and experiences of the real world. So I know with the help of these two great and my mentor I will mature into a good and hopefully, someone somewhere will feel as grateful as I do now?
Some critics branded him a filthy realist because he addressed the issues of people on the edge of American society, people whos strength stood up against poverty, sickness, alcoholism (which
hospitalized him) and social deprivation, his was the true voice of the lower classes, without hope and without despair.
As he struggled through his last days to finish, "A new path to the waterfall", the poetry stood as life itself, it was his creation.
The book opens with a poem by Ceszlaw Milosz called "Gift"
it is the poem that captures the essence of, A new path to the waterfall" and also Kavanagh's," Grand Canal bank poems"
GIFT
"A day so happy
Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body, I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw blue sea and sails." 7.
(Ceszlaw Milosz)
I think the reason this poem is placed after the introduction and before the opening title of the book, is because there is something in this poem that can relate to every poem in the book. Its as if the whole content of Carvers last selection of poetry is woven from this masterful poem: "A Day so happy".
Here is a man has given a little extra time on the earth more than he realized and he appreciates that. "Fog lifted early / I worked in the garden". Carver for me the image of Ray, sitting at his desk pressing gently his gift of words on the sheet of blank paper, the creation of that landscape of the mind, Carver country.
"Hummingbird's were over honeysuckle flowers."
Gives me the image of his wife who was with him in his garden of diseased delight and blends so beautifully with the poem he wrote for her in section five of the book:
HUMMINGBIRD
for Tess
Suppose I say summer,
write the word "Hummingbird"
put it in an envelope,
take it down the hill
to the box, When you open
my letter you will recall
those days and how much,
just how much, I love you. 8.
"Gift": "There is no thing on earth I wanted to possess".
Which takes me to the way he felt in the poem, "Gravy".
The idea for the poem comes from a conversation he had with his wife as they sat facing the Strait of Juan De Fuca, a stretch of water that separates Vancouver Island from the state of Washington.
His wife says," You remember telling me how you almost died before you met me? and he answered, "It could've ended back then and we'd never have met, none of this would have happened" , and they sat there marveling at the beautiful scenery and what they had been allowed, "Its Gravy" Ray said " Pure Gravy" the last lines of that poem:
"I'm a lucky man, I've had ten years longer
than I or anyone expected. Pure Gravy
and don't forget it." 9.
"I knew no one worth my envying him.""
This line fits so well with the poem that followed Gravy called "No Need" and the last lines are:
"We shall not meet again in this life,
"So kiss me goodbye now, kiss me again.
Once more. there, that's enough
Now, my dearest, let me go,
its time to be on my way" 10.
"Whatever evil I had suffered / I forgot / to think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me"
As John Lahr of the Listener writs as a footnote at the back cover
of Anew path to the waterfall: " The keynote of Raymond Carver's last book of the present, rather than regret for the past. It is valediction forbidding mourning, an urgent celebration of life and love in the face of death". Lahr was trying to say, in the words of Carver himself, here the last stanza from a poem called "Rain" from A new path to the waterfall.
Would I live my life over again?
Make the same unforgivable mistakes?
Yes, given half a chance, Yes"
9. "Gravy", Carver, A new path p 154.
10. " No Need", Anew path, p.155.
"Hummingbird", "Anew path p.128
"In my body, I felt no pain."
Which brings me to my favorite poem in the book, "What the doctor said".
H said it doesn't look good
he said it looks bad in fact real bad
he said I counted thirty-two of them on one lung before
I quit counting them
I said I'm glad I wouldn't want to know
about any more being there than that
he said are you a religious man do you kneel down
in forest groves and let yourself ask for help
when you come to a waterfall
mist blowing against your face and arms
do you stop and ask for understanding at those moments
I said not yet but I intend to start today
he said I'm really sorry he said
I wish I had some other kind of news to give you
I said amen and he said something else
I didn't catch and not knowing what else to do
and not wanting him to have to repeat it
and me not to fully digest it
I just looked at him
for a minute he looked back, it was then
I jumped up and shook hands with this man who'd just given me something no one else on earth had given me
I may even have thanked him habit being so strong. 12.
That poem captures the sense of a man riddled with cancer that would have devastated most people and brought them to their knees in pain and grief but through poetry, he stands away from the disease and stops death slithering upon him like a snake.
"Now", the word he wrote on his cigarette packs, the present, live for the moment, you have to admire the man for his self determination, through that journey from the darkness of his past of the characters of his stories and poems. He is gripped in the nirvana of his own death without any regrets.
Tess Gallagher says in the introduction of "A new path, "The last section of the book deals with stages of his awareness as his
health worsened and he moved toward death. I n "Gravy" as Iv'e mentioned, he displaces a devastating significance of death in the present by inserting the memory of a prior death narrowly avoided. when in 1976-1977 he had nearly died of alcoholism.
So in effect he uses his coming death as proof of a former escape and death, he realized once displaced by such an excess of living during the ten productive years he'd been allowed, could never be quite the same".
11. "Rain", Carver, A new path p.38
12." what the doctor said, Carver, A new path p. 149.
Nevertheless, the introductory from Chekhov( "Foreboding"
and" Sparrow Nights") acknowledge an inner panic. Along with the matter of fact of "What the doctor said" and in the practicing for death, there is defiance, and the two poems which rehearse the final goodbye, " No need" and "Through the boughs" last lines:
"Give me your hand for a time. Hold on
to mine. That's right, yes. Squeeze hard. Time was we
thought we had time on our side. Time was , time was
those ragged birds cry." 13.
Tess continued, " I hadn't realized until three weeks after Ray's death, as I went over the manuscript to enter corrections Ray had made that I had perfectly, though unwittingly, enacted the instructions of "No need" the night before his death. The kisses which had been meant as "Goodnight" had, at the time, carried the possibility that Ray would not wake again. " Don't be afraid" I said "Just go into your sleep now" and finally, "I love you"- to which he had answered" I love you too. You get some sleep now"
He never opened his eyes again, and at 6:20 the next morning he stopped breathing". 14
The last line from the poem, " Gift" "When straightening up, I saw
the blue sea and the sails". I could relate the poem "Gift" to so much of Raymond Carver's work and if I was to do that I would be writing a book and not a thesis, but that last line from "Gift" takes me back to the title of this thesis " Where water comes together with other water".
13." through the boughs, A new path p.156.
14. Tess Gallagher, Introduction, A new path, p.13-27.
The title of the book of poetry, the beautiful tragedy of a man that lived and loved for the moment even if death is part of that moment.
"Where water comes together with other water "What a beautiful line to depict the life of a man that took the image of a tiny droplet of water and created, " A new path to the waterfall". To clarify
those last lines of " Gift", the last poem a path o Raymond Carver's "Late Fragment".
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth". 15.
Because I have based this work of Carver's around the poem" Gift"
( not that it was my idea, it was Carver's ) that is why it stands on the first page before the title of the book, but because I did I will end this part of the thesis with another poem by Czeslaw Milosz called "Ars Poetica" a poem I know Carver loved because Tess includes it in the intro. The poem gives me the whole spectrum of Raymond Carver and what he was trying to achieve in writing his life his death and also relates beautifully to Kavanagh and those lines he quoted from Longfellow( see page .5.)
"Late fragment!, Anew path,p.158.
Ars Poetica
"I have always aspired to a more spacious form
that would be free from the claims of poetry and prose
and would let us understand each other without exposing
the author or reader to sublime agonies.
In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:
a thing is brought forth which we didn't know we had in us,
so we blink our eyes, as if a great tiger, had sprung out
and stood in the light, lashing his tail". 16
Tess Gallagher: "I seem important finally to say that Ray did not regard his poetry as simply a hobby or a pastime he turned to when he wanted a rest from fiction. Poetry was a spiritual necessity.
The truth he came to through his poetry involved dismantling of artifice to a degree. He'd read Milosz lines in "Ars Poetica and they'd appealed to him". I know there are flaws in my links with Carver country and Kavanagh country, the time, Carver didn't bloom as a writer until after Kavanagh's death, and the place, Ireland and America, but it is the landscape of their writing that is similar in so many ways.
16." Ars Poetica" A new path, p.24.
The landscape of imagination that took them from the lower levels
of the class system to be men of worth, even geniuses in their own right, gives me the hope at least of rising above my state-funded
existence, to feel worth in my writing and in the eyes of friends and family. So, real-time and place doesn't differ that much if the struggle for existence is the same. They both knew the toil of earning, I know few escapes this, but I mention it because they did through the spiritual medium of poetry and prose which they used to highlight that toil and show it as an inspirational force instead of the defeat of spirit. They both knew the harsh poverty of the working class and knew that it wasn't a romantic journey, Kavanagh's "Great hunger " for instance shows the brutal reality
of Patrick Maguire as an overworked slave to the land.
The last lines of the poem read:
" He stands in the doorway of his house
a ragged sculptor of the wind, October
creaks the rotted matress, the bed-posts.
fall. No hope. No lust. the hungry fiend
screams the apocalypse of clay in every.
corner of this land". 17
17.Kavanagh, The complete poems". p. 79
Carver also experienced the fractured spirit caused by poverty and too little education, which resulted in futile attempts to lock out the pain with alcohol. Carver's mentor the Russian writer Anton Chekhov wrote " peasant blood flows through my veins, and you cannot astound me with the virtues of the peasantry". This was a line Carver used often to naive students or reporters who attemped to brand him the spokesman for the glories of the working class experience. Although like Kavanagh he never forgot those menial jobs of his past and he did feel strongly for those that didn't have a way out of such a life, in his short stories he shows that such lives were not without value that their suffering was real and should not be swept into the gutters disregarded.
since Both poets as I have said already received a basic education,
Kavanagh says in one of his poems, " I grabbed an education late
but barely". Carver married young and had to work for his familie's survival while in his sparce spare time wrote and attended creative writing classes. For both poets as with a lot of writers like Lowell and Bishop for instance, the flow of water was as much a spiritual flow as a great source of inspiration , especially as both men suffered from lung cancer and through their poetry, from the beauty of rivers and canals they found a great healing, in as they said "holy places" that washed their suffering. In March 1955 Kavanagh underwent surgery for lung cancer, the unexpected fatal disease was the most traumatic event to occur in his life since his departure from Inniskeen. His diseased lung was removed and his recovery was spent with his sister in Longford, he returned to Dublin and spent most of his days on the banks of the Grand Canal.
The scene of the canal made a huge impact on him. Previous to that he was sometimes a very harsh and bitter poet, but in his weakened condition the poet was content to surrender himself to the pleasures of looking and listening to the people of the city and the soft flow of the canal as he reclined on its grassy banks.
This was to be the place of his rebirth free from the burdened strife of his past, as he says in the essay, "From Monaghan to the Grand Canal". "I have been thinking of making my grove on the banks of the Grand Canal near Baggot Street Bridge where in recent days I rediscovered my roots. My hegira was to the Grand Canal where again I saw the beauty of water and when I stood on a sharp slope in Monaghan, where I imaginatively stand now, looking across to Slieve Gullion and south Armagh. An attractive landscape
of small farms and a culture that has not changed in a thousand years". 18
The extract from the poem, "Moment on the Canal" shows his feeling of magic and wonder:
Hold it, hold its slippery tail
This moment as you lie on the Canal bank
In hot summer weather:
Although you have occasional twinges of pain
You are not unhappy and are entitled to thank
God that the grass you lie on is exactly
The same grass that meant so much to you years ago". 19
18 Kavanagh," Collected Prose, Martin Brian & o' Keefe 1973.p223. 19 Kavanagh, " The Collected Poems".p,301.
In September 1987 Raymond Carver was diagnosed with lung caner. After spitting up blood, he went through a ten month struggle with the cancer the reoccurred as a brain tumor in March.
After refusing recommendations from doctors to undergo brain surgery, he went through seven weeks of full blown radiation.
After a short respite however, tumors were again found on his lungs in June his poem" Where water comes together with other water", reminds me so much of Kavanagh's " Moment on the canal"
Carver wrote:
"I love creeks and the music they make,
And rills, in glades and meadows, before
they have a chance to become creeks.
I may even love them best of all
for their secrecy. I almost forgot
to say something about their source!
Can anything be more wonderful than a spring?
But the big streams have my heart too.
And the places streams flow into rivers.
The open mouths of rivers where they join the sea.
The places where water comes together with other water.
Those places stand out in my mind like holy places.
But the coastal river! I love them the way some men love horses or glamorous women. I have a thing
for this cold swift water.
Just looking at it make my blood run
and my skin tingle. I could sit
and watch these rivers for hours.
Not one of them like any other.
I'm foty-five years old today.
Would anyone believe it if I said
I was once thirty-five?
My heart empty and sere at thirty-five!
Five more years had to pass before it began to flow again.
I'll take all the time I please this afternoon
befoe leaving my place alongside this river. It pleases me, loving
rivers. Loving them all the way back
To their source.
Loving everything that increases me" 20
Kavanagh says in a piece called " Self Portrait" which was
initially a television script: There are two kinds of simplicity of going away and the simplicity of return. The last is ultimate in sophistication. In the final simplicity we don't care whether we appear foolish or not. We are satisfied with being ourselves, however small. So, it is that on the banks of The Grand Canal between Baggot St, and Leeson St, bridges in the warm summer of nineteen-fifty-five.
20. Carver,"Where water comes together with other water.p.17.
Ilayband watched the green water of the canal I had just come out of the hospital and I wrote" 21.
CANAL BANK WALK
" Leafy-with-love and the green waters of the canal
Pouring redemption for me, that I do
The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal.
Grow with nature again as before I grew.
The bright stick trapped, the breeze adding a third
Party to the couple kissing on an old seat,
And a bird gathering materials for the nest for the word
Eloquently new abandoned to its delirious beat.
O worn world enrapture me in a web
Of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech,
Feed the gaping need of my senses, give me ad lib
To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech
For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven
From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven. 22.
He goes on to say: "And so in this moment of great
daring I became a poet." Through trying to show you the links between both poets work, although Kavanagh would never had read Carver's poetry, I want to show how Kavanagh was heavily influenced by American poetry, and also how American poetry influenced by Kavanagh. As Kevin Mc Eneaney wrote in an essay called " Patrick Kavanagh His Trinity". Kavanagh's confessional style inaugurated a new mode of style in modern poetry, a style that became successful as well as popular in the U.S. Robert Lowell, his disciples and numerous other poets began to imitate this style a decade or so later, and it is now considered to be a staple of modern poetry. 23.
22. Kavanagh, complete poems, p.294-295
23.Kavanagh," Man and Poet," Goldsmith press, 1987,p.269.
I offer an extract from Eamonn Grennan's essay: " American Connection" Oodly enough, perhaps, it is Patrick Kavanagh, the poet of the parochial, who is most vocal in the generation about his debts to American Poetry.
The truth of the matter is that Kavanagh drank deep at this transatlantic well, and was the first Irish poet to bring American influence into its postmodernist phase, post Pound and Eliot that is. As for the other poets mentioned, for him
to this influence seems a way out of the Yeatsian cul-de-sac.
Kavanagh's submission to American influence
falls into two phases. The first brings him into contact with the imagists" and Gertrude Stein . The lucid hard-edged quality of the imagists " excited my clay-heavy mind", he says while Steins work" was like whiskey to me, her strange rhythms broke up the cliché formation of my thought". Both in the imagists and in stein he found the encouragement to be " hard and clear," undecorative, to present image and " to make full use of free verse". He admired the work of J.G. Fletcher, most likely valuing its ability to be emotional in a direct, unsentimental way.
The fact that Imagism "praises by showing" the edges the influence out of the formal and into the area of feeling, of a particular attitude to the subject.
Kavanagh, man and poet, goldsmith press 1987, p.269.
Basically, then, Kavanagh first went to the technical emotional school to the Americans, tearing what he could from the poets in the Conrad Aikens anthology, " Twentieth Century Poetry".
By 1947 he is knowledgeable enough to say that for him the best American poets are " Dickinson among the women , and among the men, Frost, Jeffers Bishop, Hart Crane, Richard
Eberhart and young Harry Brown, a new poet influenced by Yeat's". Kavanagh's second phase under the influence of American poetry departs from the main stream, connecting up with the overflowing tributary generated by the Beat poets".
My example of this is the last poem In Kavanagh's "Collectedpoems" which the Beat poet Robert Creeley, included in his essay on Kavanagh called " The true poet, 24. and for me it reads like something from the pen of Kerouac. or Creeley
himself:
Extempore at poetry centennial '67.
" But since the arrival of the Beatles and the Stones
Anything goes
and I am glad .
that freedom is mad
dancing with pot.
Hurray, hurray
I say, for this beautiful day.
"The American Connection", continued. This coincides more or less with his own poetical rebirth in the mid 50s. He sees their work as an antidote to what he objects to in the " artifical verbalism" of Richard Wilbur and others, and his attitude to them in 1958 is part mockery, part envy. That rascal Allen Ginsberg has made news with the Beat generation.... You only have to roar and use bad language. I am genuinley thinking of having a go. Later he says he still likes " the fun of a lot of contemporary verse... even people like Ginsberg to some extent
funny stuff. It is vitality he admires, Ferningetti, " is alive".
What Kavanagh gets from the Beats is the encouragement to exercise his own talent in a relaxed way, for, they have all written direct, personal statements, nothing involved, no, just statements of their position. That's all. It was this sort of encouragement which led him to the "direct personal statements" of such poems as the Canal sonnets" 26.
In 1956 Kavanagh spent six months in America with his brother Peter, on his return he felt he had discovered a new mood in his poetry, especially the Beat poetry. Like Lowell when he read the Beat poetry for the first time, he got a real charge of inspiration and his poetry from then on began to flow in a free style. As Paul Mariani says in his book," Lost Puritan, A life of Robert Lowell" not that he was a convert to the beats, for he knew too well, " that the best poems are not necessarily poems that read aloud".
28.Kavanagh" Man and Poet", p.339.
Still in the wake of the Beats, his early poems, " now seemed like prehistoric monsters dragged down into the bog and death
by their ponderous armour", so that reading his own work aloud during his West Coast tour, he found himself reciting
what he no longer felt. No sooner was he back in Boston, than he began writing lines in a new style" 27.
I think the same can be said of Kavanagh, although both men stuck to some sort of form, Kavanagh to rhyme and Lowell to metre, the poetry in that form was free to flow. Kavanagh's poems were set in the present tense celebrating the here and now. capturing the moment no longer gripping it with anger but embracing it like a lover of life, a man given a second chance.
The first poem where this freedom is evident is " The Hospital". where everything is exactly as it is without being transformed or disguised:
" A year ago I fell in love with funcitional ward.
Of a chest hospital: square cubicles in a row
Plain concrete, wash basins-an art lovers woe,
Not counting how fellow in the next bed snored.
But nothing whatever is by love debarred,
The common and banal her heat can know.
The corridor led to a stairway and below
Was the inexhaustible adventure of a graveled yard.
This is what love does to things: the Rialto bridge,
The main gate that was bent by a heavy lorry,
The seat at the back of a shed that was a suntrap.
Nameing things is the love-act and its pledge,
For we must record love's mystery without claptrap,
Snatch out of time the passionate transitory." 28
27.Paul Mariani, " Lost Puritan, A life of Robert Lowell,
Norton press, p.275.
28.. Kavanagh ,complete poems , p.279
This poem reminds me of American poetry in that it shows he is taking a radical stance, placing what is normally disregarded like the beat poets of the city, making poetry out of that which is not thought to be poetic and placing his language in the form of a sonnet linked with the origins of a love song.
The language in the form of a sonnet linked with visions, a declaration of commitment to the present and a marriage to the optomistic poetry of the future. The last lines of this poem shows he wants to seize the moment, like Carver's " Late Fragment" as if it were his last.
As Antoinette Quinn says: " This sonnet bears out Kavanagh's sense that his poetry was recircling towards " Shancoduff" its themes are the poets unconventional love for an aesthetically unattractive terrain and the love object". 29.
The poems that followed " The Hospital" is seen here in that he is concentrating on the objects rather than commentary.
29. Antoinne Quinn, "Born again romantic, gill and macmillian
p.405.
Expressing himself in a new way, no longer the self obsessed poet of the past, without a care that his last poems he is just appreciating it for what it is, a part of his spiritual journey, the act of naming objects is the act of love.
The poet is aware of his world as in "The Hospital" the common place is highlighted, and the easy relaxed attitude of this poem is the celebration of everyday life. And there in the poem again, like Carver's is the original, virginal water washing away the suffering of the past., " Is":
The important thing is not
To imagine on ought
Have something to say.
A raison d'etre, a plot for a play.
The only teaching
Subsists in watching
Things move or just color
without comment from the scholar.
To look is enough
In the business of love
Casually remark
On the deer running in the park,
Mention water again
Always virginal,
Always original,
It washes out original sin.
Name for the future
The every-day's of nature
And without being analytic
Create a great epic
Girls in red blouses,
Steps up to houses
Sunlight round gables
Gossip young fables,
The life of the street.
O wealthy me ! O happy me!
With and inexhaustible theme
I'll die in harness,
I'll die in harness with my scheme.¬" 30.
During this period of the late 50s everything fell into place for the poet, he was receiving the recognition he so long yearned for, he embarked on a series of lectures ay University College, Dublin, they were so successful they became an annual event until 1959. His novel " Tarry Flynn"," The Collected poems" and his "Collected Pruse" were reprinted, in May 1960, the book of poetry," Come dance with Kitty Stobling" was greeted with critical acclaim and was the Poetry Book Society choice in the summer of that year.
30. Kavanagh, complete poems, p.287.
But during the early 60s everything began to fall apart for him, his poetry began to portray his losing battle with alcoholism, illness and failing inspiration, " The Same Again":
" I have my friends, my public and they are waiting
For me to come again as their one and only bard
With a new statement that will repay the wait-ment
While I hit the bottle hard.
I know it is not right to be light and flippant
There are people in the streets who steer by my star.
There is nothing they could do but view while I threw
Back large whiskeys in the corner of a smoky bar
And if only I would get drunk it wouldn't be so bad
With a pain in my stomach I wasn't even comic
Swallowing every digestive pill to be had.
Some of my friends stayed faithful but quie a handful
looked upon it as the end: I could quite safely be
Dismissed a dead loss in the final toss.
He's finished and that's definitely." 31
On April 1967 he wed Katherine Maloney a woman with whom he had a long friendship. His public appearance, before his death on the 30th November.
31` Kavanagh, complete poems, p.349.
He became I'll during the performance and went from the Kavanagh homestead to a Dublin nursing home the following day. I t was to be his last journey from Inniskeen to Dublin, retracing the route that he had first taken thirty- six years before, across those fields of Hackballscross where I ran happily as a boy, where nature and his poetry lingered extracting the debris of war from my young mind, and this thesis I offer this poem I have written as a tribute to these two great poets, who have given me the hope of aspiring to a more spacious form.
RAY RIVER
Although I'm here in Donegal and not Yakima
Washington state, or in Dublin reclining
On the banks of the Grand Canal.
I feel a sense that Raymond Carver
And Patrick Kavanagh are here with me
Following the Ray River to the sea
Of this poem.
The winds sway the reeds reflecting
On the the rippling water, on a bend a stream
Flows into the Ray, cascading on the rocks.
I love the music of this place, the silent
Harmonies of the source, the spring,
Falling from high on Muckish Mountain
To where I sit translating nature to poetry.
Further on another stream follows in
Ever so quiet, secretly subtle, like the clarity
Of wonder in the undercurrents
I'm here at the sea, the reservoir.
Tory Island looms black, remote above
The wild white waves, poetry echoing
Across golden strand.
The colors of a rainbow rise from the sea.
The intangible essence that lingers here.
The blending colors fade to blue
And I fell a slight tingle on my fingers.
I look down to see a multi colored spider
Crawling across my hand and the open
Pages of this notebook, as if that
were its only purpose.
ADRIAN FOX
Dedicated to: Jimmy, Janice and Cathal O'
I WOKE WITH POEM'S
Reeling behind my eyes
Complete poems.
Waiting like this one
For the right silences
Of the day
to reveal themselves.
SOURCE
The sun beats down like a pick-
pocket, fleecing cool air.
My son lies here beside me
suckling his bottle.
The tiny fingers of his left-hand
fidget's in my hair, the soft breeze
flutters through the wisps of his curls
and opens the book of poetry
revealing " Energy " then
" The old days ", to and fro between
" Energy "," Happiness", " Energy "
" Happiness ", then " Next year "
and back to " Happiness. "
Suddenly, a sharp gust flows over me
holding the leaves of the book open
at a page without a title, just three lines
at the top, that read:
" Loving them all the way back
to their source, loving every-
thing that increases me ".
A hint of color
Hits the corner of my eye
From the flower bed.
...
Nietzsche! We are stuck
In god is dead how do we
get out, humanity.
A hint of color
Hits the corner of my eye
From the flower bed.
...
Nietzsche! We are stuck
In god is dead how do we
get out, humanity.
