[This is the second of a pair of posts celebrating the life and work of Irish poet John Montague.  The first can be found immediately below this one, and I recommend reading them in sequence.]
Like many Americans, I encountered Yeats for the first time in a “British Literature” survey and found him both mystifying and mesmerizing.  The Byzantium poems, “The Second Coming,” “Lapis Lazuli,” “Among School Children,” “Leda and the Swan,” the standard anthology pieces, which my professor explained in scrupulous detail, formed my private syllabus, but Yeats’ poems were examined more for their high modernist method than for their Irish political and cultural context and implications.

Even in graduate school, where Yeats was one of four modernists I studied in a seminar, I was never encouraged to much consider his national identity or ask if there were Irish poets after Yeats.  Clearly the misleading “English Lit” concept was too broad and robust, but about 1978 Kay Byer started telling me about Heaney, whose close connection to the work of the earth and the vernacular echoed with my studies of the poetry of the American South and who was suddenly well on the way to becoming my favorite poet.

I eventually managed to discover County Monaghan’s Patrick Kavanagh, author of The Great Hunger in the early forties, a poet whose harrows and horses, country dances and sexual repression balanced Yeats’ myths and intricacy in their contribution to the rough rural and yet cosmopolitan poems of Heaney.  What I didn’t discover for another dozen years was the exciting work of John Montague, both lyrics and sequences like The Rough Field, which Heaney knew intimately and admired.  It took me a trip to Ireland in the late eighties to understand how fundamental Montague’s work had been to the formation of Heaney’s aesthetic, and probably Michael Longley’s, as well.

Born in the U. S. of Irish Catholic parents but sent back to Northern Ireland as a child, then fostered away from his brothers, Montague began his life as a divided person, an explorer of thresholds and liminal emotions.  Catholic in a protestant plantation, Irish speaker in a landscape of imposed English, he displayed deep Irish roots even as he cultivated an international perspective.  His wives were French and then American, his voice was prominent in the Irish traditional music revival, yet he taught for much of his life at SUNY-Albany, as well as University College Cork, somewhat mirroring his own education at University College and the University of Iowa,  Deeply private in many of his poems, he unleashed Irish history and myth to intensify and complicate his verses.  Also at home in Paris and Nice (where he died), he was appointed Ireland’s first national Chair of Poetry, comparable to a poet laureate position.

One hears two primary camps, not always at odds, in the discussions of Montague’s poetry.  Some celebrate his lyric gift, especially as it explores the nuances of romantic love and of romantic and family loss.  The other voice brings forth “the authenticity of his anger” over sectarian and brotherly conflict, and that faction is divided over the question of how hope and sorrow interact.  Glimmers of the former and shadows of the latter strive and interlock in his poems.  One need only scan the titles of his books (The Rough Field, The Great Cloak, The Dead Kingdom, Poisoned Lands, Forms of Exile, but also and always A Chosen Light) to realize that subjects of such great pitch and moment, no matter how locally and personally they are addressed, are his obsession, and the bone of Irish animosity draws him away from the shuddered satisfactions of passion long after the marrow is gone from the bone.

Christopher Ricks wrote of The Rough Field in The New York Times Book Review, “In Mr. Montague’s fine, firm poems . . . loving force is always made real by being threatened by the angers of Ireland.”  Heaney called it “an utterance from the underworld of love and bitterness.”  Of Collected Poems Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin said, “John Montague’s poetic gift is for elegance and clarity; his voice is austere and musical, his vision is of sharp gleaming perspectives, his mentality international and modern.”

Although I enthusiastically recommend his book-length sequences where the personal and the political braid and snake and shimmer, I offer here just a sample of the shorter pieces with the urging that readers acquire the American version of John’s 1995 Collected Poems (Wake Forest, from the Gallery Press edition) and consume them till they return the favor.

I have heard many interpretations of this poem: it’s about sexual predation; about masturbation, about composition of a poem, about satisfaction and guilt; about two dozen lines, about seizing the ineffable, about being fishers of men.  Maybe all of them, but for me it is about wildness and capture, beauty and the desire to touch it.  It’s a species of early catch-and-release, but it is the prey that will not release, the angler (or guddler) who cannot shake free.  Kidding aside, it is terse and precise and radiant, from “tendril-light” to “lightly pulsing gills.”  It is a fine, firm poem.

THE TROUT
for Barrie Cooke

Flat on the bank I parted
Rushes to ease my hands
In the water without a ripple
And tilt them slowly downstream
To where he lay, tendril-light,
In his fluid sensual dream.

Bodiless lord of creation,
I hung briefly above him
Savouring my own absence,
Senses expanding in the slow
Motion, the photographic calm
That grows before action.

As the curve of my hands
Swung under his body
He surged, with visible pleasure.
I was so preternaturally close
I could count every stipple
But still cast no shadow, until

The two palms crossed in a cage
Under the lightly pulsing gills.
Then (entering my own enlarged
Shape, which rode on the water)
I gripped.  To this day I can
Taste his terror on my hands.
(CP)

This next poem is child-delicate, but also a testament to the indelible nature of love.

CHILD
for Una

A firefly gleams, then
fades upon your cheek.
Now you hide beneath
everything I write:
love’s invisible ink,
heart’s watermark.
(CP)

And then there is the sorrow when loves fails, regret sets in, the pain is not distributed equally.  One reviewer has suggested that the signature of Montague’s love poetry is that he does not protect himself, which is a rare stance.

SEPARATION

Two fish float:

one slowly downstream
into the warm
currents of the known,

the other tugging
against the stream,
disconsolate twin,

the golden
marriage hook
tearing its throat.
(CP)

Anticipation of nostalgia and an attempt to remember one of the monumental small moments appear in the following poem.  It should be no surprise that a poet of Montague’s stripe would eventually sour on love, only to be rejuvenated later in life.  This poem echoes Pound and his sources a little, but the narrator’s vulnerability makes it a more valuable poem to me than the elder poet’s famous Metro poem.  The address, without the source of the speaker’s hypersensitive state kept far in the distant shadows of the poem, resonates with the early photographic process but makes it livelier than any one sense can.

A CHOSEN LIGHT

1. 11 rue Daguerre

At night, sometimes, when I cannot sleep
I go to the atelier door
And smell the earth of the garden.

It exhales softly,
Especially now, approaching springtime,
When tendrils of green are plaited

Across the humus, desperately frail
In their passage against
The dark, unredeemed parcels of earth.

There is white light on the cobblestones
And in the apartment house opposite –
All four floors – silence.

At that stillness – soft but luminously exact,
A chosen light – I notice that
The tips of the lately grafted cherry-tree

Are a firm and lacquered black.
(CP)

“A Grafted Tongue” is a small narrative with a large wallop.  An Irish-speaking boy in an English-speaking school is humiliated when he says a word in Irish.  The impact continues for generations.  This is surely an easy poem for Americans to grasp, now that children whose cultural identities don’t fit the “norm” are suffering so much in the current wave of bullying.

A GRAFTED TONGUE

(Dumb,
bloodied, the severed
head now chokes to
speak another tongue –

As in
a long suppressed dream,
some stuttering garb-
led ordeal of my own)

An Irish
child weeps at school
repeating its English.
After each mistake

The master
gouges another mark
on the tally stick
hung about its neck

Like a bell
on a cow, a hobble
on a straying goat.
To slur and stumble

In shame
the altered syllables
of your own name;
to stray sadly home

And find
the turf-cured width
of your parent’s hearth
growing slowly alien:

In cabin
and field, they still
speak the old tongue.
You may greet no one.

To grow
a second tongue, as
harsh a humiliation
as twice to be born.

Decades later
that child’s grandchild’s
speech stumbles over lost
syllables of an old order.

Finally, I recommend to American readers the body (and the blood and spirit) of Montague’s work, among others of his countrymen, because the United States is, quite astonishingly, now divided in a way reminiscent of the times of the Troubles in Ireland, a division that is revealing us to be as parochial and bitter as we once feared the Irish were.  Seeing such animosity through the prism of Montague’s wounded, wounding poetry may bring clarity and recommend charity to us in a time when we so desperately need it.  I close with John’s poem on the 1998 car bombing in Omagh, County Tyrone (29 fatalities, hundreds of injuries] which I can testify nearly rent his spirit in two.  It is not a poem to be memorized, but to be learned by heart.

A Response to Omagh

All I can do is curse, complain.
Who can endorse such violent men?
As history creaks its bloody hinge
and the unspeakable is done again.

With no peace after the deluge,
no ease after the storm,
we learn to live inside ruin
like a second home.

What we, too, can find in Montague’s poems over and over is simply to “learn to live.”  Not a small thing.

Last Saturday I had been in the woodlot quartering a shagbark brought down last year because –  long assailed, perhaps even “farmed” for beetles, by pileateds – it was riddled with impressive holes.  Air cold, wood old and mazed – I had anticipated pleasant work.  But the tree still had heart and vigor in sections, and I tired quickly.  Indoors, I found a message noting the death of Irish poet John Montague, with whom I spent much time in the 90’s and at the beginning of this century.  He was about sixty when I met him and 87 when he passed, but his energy and curiosity, capacity for hard work and zest for life prevented me from ever seeing him as older than when I met him.  He was a man who had struggled with himself as much as external forces;  I admired his work and loved his company.

Bris-mo-croi, as they say in the Irish: “It breaks my heart.”

I’m going to post two blog posts about John, this first one more personal, anecdotal, the second celebrating his substantial achievements as a poet, though he was also a writer of stories, novels, reviews, guide books, manifestos, all manner of literary journalism.  Still, in the marrow, he was a poet, oft overlooked as the bridge between Patrick Kavanagh and Heaney, a rustic who could turn a sonnet silver, a Jungian who spoke the idiolect of Ulster turf cutters.

A voice soft as a summer mist in Galway, a shambling gait, a smile quick but a touch restrained, a high sense of irony, devotion to his wife, novelist Elizabeth Wassell, a badger tenacity when questions were raised – John was at once worldly and homely, stellar and earthy, quick and deliberate, equally a lover of a clever makeshift style and a connoisseur of Parisian rose windows.  He was sensual and randy, but he would have me turn the car toward a pub as the hour of six approached, as he did not wish to miss hearing the angelus rung on the radio.  He knew his haute cuisine but also declared, “The potato is your man.  He’ll not let you down,” as he pocketed leftover spuds from our table in a pricey Breton restaurant.  He was great craic.

On two occasions I spent a couple of weeks with John and Elizabeth in Letter Cottage, Ballydehob, West Cork.  We strolled together, sampled lamb (“almost delectable, even this far from spring”), sang ballads (our voices “tractor axles in want of oil”), and I drove them hither and yon.  Neither could operate a car back then, and they often made it the three miles to the village on shank’s mare.  Once I drove them to Dublin for an award ceremony and fund raising launch for a new magazine.  It would have been enough to hear his stories of the locals like Declan Handbag and Declan Wildlife (two locals, one a gay bon vivant, the other a forest ranger), but John had written the first comprehensive tourist guide of Ireland, and he was forever directing me to turn left at those beeches or reverse a hundred meters to a near-invisible stone.  He must have known every rath and tower, holy well and abbey ruin in the country, and I saw many of them.

I should say that the pilgrimage to Dublin engraved John and Eliza in my mind because I came down with a monstrous sinus infection just as we reached the Black Pool, early seat of Viking trespassers.  They housed me in the holy Arts Club and tended me while I produced enough mucous to make Joyce’s “snotgreen sea” seem a commonplace.  I survived to attend both a wild pub argument between Derek Mahon and some other poets, my first real taste of Irish wit and enmity loosed at gale force, and an elegant cocktail party with celebrities and outlaws mingling in fierce competition to become “the most interesting man in the world.”  (I believe the victor was Michael D. Higgins, poet and socialist pol then, President of Ireland today.)  But throughout the adventure and misadventure, Liz and John ministered unto me, introduced me around and insisted upon my brilliance as a poet.  John had been a great carouse mate with Beckett (whose birthday I share, along with Heaney), and said in French and with a twist of mischief, he wished I had known “Sam.”  What’s not to love there?

By the way, at that gala John read his newest poem, a lament for the town of Omagh, where sectarian militants had recently slain about three dozen with a car bomb.  Direct and sorrowful, broken-hearted, this small poem looms large in my mind, representing a significant portion of what John Montague was and is to me.

A Response to Omagh

All I can do is curse, complain.
Who can endorse such violent men?
As history creaks its bloody hinge
and the unspeakable is done again.

With no peace after the deluge,
no ease after the storm,
we learn to live inside ruin
like a second home.

The diction, tightness of meter and rhyme, economy, gravity of the indictment and bridge from human atrocity to Biblical-sounding disasters of weather – well, the room was a held breath before the sorrowful applause began.  Some few (I trust an Irish audience) would have recognized the opening line from the beginning of John’s “Cassandra’s Answer,” written in the eighties and published in Mount Eagle.  The new poem was a more nuanced, less myth-cloaked version, and it cut deeper while resurrecting the older poem’s Homeric resonance.

Once John, Elizabeth and I traveled to the Wicklow Mountains to visit Guinness heir Gareth Browne on his vast estate, which was also a game preserve with red deer vaulting about, hares quivered in their meaze, ravens, badger, peacocks and foxes, grouse a-plenty, a partridge striding right through the door of the gamekeeper’s lodge where we were housed and cocking its head, as if to investigate what I was doing with my stick pencil scratching on paper at the trestle table.  What I learned in the long late-night discussions, besides the volatile politics of Irish literature, included the history of the traditional Irish music, spearheaded by the Chieftains, who were conjured backed (with the other artists of Claddagh Records) by Gareth himself.  The big house was under renovation, so Gareth occupied the servants’ house, the servants the gatehouse, John, Liz and I the pristinely luxurious two-bedroom cottage a mile or so of twisty mountain road from the main compound.  There, as at home and everywhere I ever traveled with them, John and Elizabeth rose fairly early and sat silently across a table from each other to write.  It was high discipline and deeply rooted harmony, and I have more than once seen each raise eyes to glimpse the other, smile then return to work, recharged.  I had not seen love like that before.  I remember that sojourn well for those mornings and the music and poetry of the evenings, but also because a certain actress invited Gareth and Company up to the Sally Gap, where she was filming Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa.  Later, the magnificent raconteur Michael Lindsay-Hogg (director and Orson Welles’ son) took us out to dinner, and on Sunday we learned of the death of Princess Diana, which put the whole cadre into a dark place, John especially.  He kept shaking his head and mumbling about how hard she tried to be both regal and natural, and how the effort tore her asunder.

I’m aware of the halo effect and how it can creep in, but John could be persnickety and combative, too, rantish and sly, stubborn, bitter over his position on the bardic totem pole (like nearly every poet I have ever met, Mirror Man included), but these were not the modes I most knew him in.  He was generous, courtly (approaching condescension on occasion), witty, mischievous, inquisitive, resourceful, erudite.  His daughter Oonah said of him: “He was a country boy, and mother put the manners on him.”  So, a culchie trafficking among the city mice, the cosmopolitans, the cognoscenti, the opulent and silver-spooned.  I have often seen him in the role of peacemaker and messenger, and a couple of the poets in their obituaries said that, in his last decade, he had reconciled with the higher esteem of his younger friend Heaney enjoyed and praised his Ulster countryman with no sign of irony or puckishness.

To the point of his graciousness: when I first met John, I knew little of his poetry but had read Bitter Harvest: An Anthology of Contemporary Irish Verse from Scribners.  Of course, it contains many splendid poems by poets from Heaney, Longley, Boland, McGuckian and Muldoon.  Montague as well, but 90% were men, and I had fallen into step with some of the omitted Galway women I knew and had cultivated an unearned partisan stance.  After his presentation and reading, he came over and asked me if he could sign a copy of the book for me, but I was quippish and rude, saying something about gender and how it was a wonder the Irish even managed to reproduce with such odds.  Awful, I know.

Later, in the pub, I was sitting alone, rehearsing my feeble wit and lack of tact, when he came to my table and asked, “So who are you yourself, anyway?”

“I’m nobody, who are you?’” I Dickinsoned him.

“Ah,” he replied, “and where are you from, Nobody?”

“Georgia, Carolina, Alabama.”

“The South.  I see.  Well, I’m John from County Tyrone, the North, but also from right here and right now.”  He extended his hand.  “Can I stand you a pint?”

I was ashamed, but that was not his aim.  Though we often disagreed and jousted, never again – in Albany or Rockbridge County, in Allihees or Ballydehob or Youghal or Dublin – did a hard word between us manage to outlive the sentence that followed it.

A prodigious lover of spirits, John once in Roundstone asked the woman behind the bar for a whisky.  “Large or small,” she inquired.  “My dear lady,” he responded, “There is no such thing as a large whisky.”  On another occasion, as we sat in his kitchen garden in the late summer twilight, John opened a fresh bottle of Bushmills.  It was just dark enough for the odor of the basil in the mozzarella and the olive oil scent to eclipse the work of the eyes, but I heard the snap of the separating rings on the bottle neck and smiled.  My expression must have altered a fair amount when John tossed the cap over his shoulder into the weeds.  I knew it would be a long night and a hard morning, but we did take a walk down the boreen, and atop a signpost saw a female white owl.  It was a small snowy, whose ilk I was never going to see in the wild in my life if not right then and right there.  I stared like a child, and John whispered, “Bride of the dead, if she speaks, don’t answer.”  I can close my eyes and see it still.

This was the Montague I knew, who always wrote brief occasional poems on the flyleaf or title page of the volumes he autographed for me.  I suppose my favorite is in The Rough Field, which is English for his true hometown, Garvaghey, garbh achaidh.

For Rod Smith,
Mac Gobhann.
the poet himself,
this long song
of wrong,
from the Bard of Tyrone!
Mac Taidgh,
Still sailing on – Letter College, Ballydehob, Autumn ‘97

Like the shagbark in the woods, he had heart and vigor, and now he has fallen.  As I said, Bris-Mo-Croi.

[Next week’s blog will display a few of John Montague’s poems and a brief introduction to the nature and force of his poetry.]

by Dana Schultz

A few weeks ago I posted Part 1 of the Slipstream blog. In it I discussed the concept and fundamental problem of Slipstream, namely that it is a shorthand term for “slipping genre fiction into the mainstream” and that it lacks a concrete definition. Currently Slipstream is not a genre, rather a feeling of strangeness – i.e. cognitive dissonance – that some argue resembles the feelings one experiences from “living in the 21^st century.” My research question over the past few weeks was whether Slipstream as a writing style is relevant enough to become accepted as a genre. Or, to put in less grandiose terms, if I could at least make an argument that it should be.

And now I would like to make a few disclaimers. The first is that I study Creative Writing and I have enormous respect for the Slipstream style and even attempt to model it in my own work. The second is that my two primary sources for this article are Lesley Wheeler and Chris Gavaler, two Washington and Lee professors that are well researched in speculative fiction and also happen to be married to each other. I am very thankful for their contribution of time and ideas towards this blog post. The worlds of speculative fiction and Slipstream are big seas to navigate, and they lent me a much needed oar.
Onward to my argument. The first topic to cover is whether Slipstream as a writing style is especially relevant to the 21^st century. Some may argue, due to the political climate and information age, yes. The Oxford Dictionary named “post-truth” the word of the year. Today big data blurs the boundaries of truth because there is no longer a consensus on the facts. Confidence in the general existence of facts – i.e. absolute truths – is falling away… doesn’t that make you feel strange? This stretching of boundaries in the political world does seem to parallel the current challenging of boundaries in literary culture. For me to link cause to causation at the moment would be taking it too far, but I do believe that both represent a cultural trend of rethinking our assumptions. Bob Dylan’s award for the Nobel Prize in Literature is one example of a large trend of award organizations, the Pushcart Prize included, broadening the scope of literature they recognize.
Therefore Slipstream is a timely development because the current literary judges are receptive to boundary crossing. There is also a large domain of literary magazines – online and in print – where Slipstream style writers can take flight. This domain includes, among many others, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Phantom Drift, and Structo. However we are still faced with a fundamental problem. What does Slipstream do that speculative fiction does not? If Slipstream is simply a euphemism for “good speculative fiction,” that is not enough. However in my search to find a common thread in all the Slipstream works I’ve read, the euphemism seems to be it.

Which takes us to our second topic, should Slipstream be accepted as a genre? My answer, in spite of my appreciation for writers that fall – voluntarily or not – under the Slipstream umbrella, is currently no. These writers already have their own umbrellas, and to shove them under a second, bigger umbrella is simply redundant. There need to be stylistic elements of Slipstream that sets it clearly apart from speculative fiction before the term can gain traction. For example, do the majority of Slipstream works play with reader expectations by consciously presenting and then subverting genre tropes? Some do, but not all of them. With all of the journals and websites noticing Slipstream, the Writer’s Chronicle and Wall Street Journal among them, it is difficult to argue that Slipstream is not a movement. However it is undetermined whether this movement has a direction. For Slipstream to become a credible genre, the judges simply have to get more specific about what they claim to be Slipstream. Until then we can only speculate whether Slipstream is “real or unreal,” and we already have speculative fiction for that.

Sources

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/07/politics-in-a-post-truth-age/

http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2014/12/is-and-isnt-literary-upheavals-in-the-post-real-landscape/

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/13/bob-dylan-wins-2016-nobel-prize-in-literature

http://thereviewreview.net/publishing-tips/seeking-slipstream-list-resources

http://www.wsj.com/articles/slipstream-fiction-goes-mainstream-1423072888

Wheeler, Lesley. “Verse and the Multiverse.” Poet Lore 110.1-2 (Spring/ Summer 2015): 113-124.