Question for everyone...

I never wanted to be a poet. I wanted to be a short story writer.

I began writing poetry when I lived in Honolulu, I was very inspired by the ocean, the Hawaiian histories and legends. When I discovered that a childhood friend had sickened and died, I wrote a poem about her, which ended up being published. I couldn't believe how good that felt. I left Hawaii and moved back to Seattle. I find it much harder to write here. I discovered Poetry Circle, after spending time at a site called Poetry Critical, where I got to know Jenn Zed, and Starr. The amount of fighting at Poetry Critical was frightening; , some lunatic was pursuing Jenn which disturbed me on her behalf, but I felt helpless to stop it. I'm grateful in retrospect, for my time there, because I got to know Jenn and Starr, two poets I love and admire.

Scribble Camp members offer excellent critiques, which I value.

Thank you for sharing your story, Niall, I find it very interesting. That must have been a wonderful shock when your mother brought out a SIGNED copy of Seamus Heaney's book of poems!

Edited to ask:

Did you ever encounter Seamus Heaney in your town, growing up?

Niall, if you ever plan to visit Seattle, you HAVE to look me up! I would be hurt if you didn't! Seattle is a family-friendly place. It's a lot of fun. Don't believe what you might hear on the news, that it is all violent protests, etc. No, I've only just starting writing short stories again, I find them much harder. Well, yes, you would have been very young to be around Seamus Heaney....but I can't help but think how delighted he would have been for a young boy to go up and talk poetry with him!

Okay, I googled Bellaghy and it looks GORGEOUS.

Got to be honest, I've never really been interested in why someone chooses to write, or when and why they first started-- if I'm looking to be inspired, I might read about their life, and their thoughts on poetry, but otherwise (present company excluded) poets don't really interest me, only their writing interests me.

I was an idiot when I was younger, with a lot of harebrained ideas (most of which I picked up at school) like, all that matters is self expression. Which explains why almost everything I wrote before the age of 40 was drivel. It was forums, like this place, that gave me a reason to write, and the ability.

I had an unexpected visit to my parents house today, and with an hour to spare, visited the Seamus Heaney "Homeplace". If any of you get the chance to visit Ireland, you should put this on your to do list. Even if you're not an admirer, I would highly recommend a visit.

Here is an audio clip I recorded today, of Mid-Term Break, a poem about his younger brother who died in a road accident.

That's the reason Seamus Heaney was loved the world over....what a magnificent poem. Wish I could hear you read it!

Seamus Heaney spoke at my nephew's graduation many years ago. it was outdoors in a big football stadium and all I remember is that the acoustics were so bad they were like unintelligible train station announcements. I wrote a lot in High school and college, but I stopped writing after that until just a few years ago I met a woman on a plane who was on the board of The frost Place. They run a writers retreat every summer in the woods of New hampshire so I decided to go and have never looked back.

Thanks for starting this conversation, Niall. I wrote my first poems in high school. I was a fan of Tommy Smothers’ comedy on the Smothers Bros. Show. I remember him reading a poem he had written and it really cracked me up but I also thought he was breaking some rules in a less than professional , academic way which I found liberating.I did write a serious poem for my school newspaper under the nom de plume, Jedidiah Yssup. I was embarrassed to be thought of as a poet by my peers. I showed a friend one of my funny poems while we were in English class and our teacher asked why we were laughing. He read it and then made me come to the front of the class and read it aloud. I stammered through it and I was a big hit with my classmates. I was having trouble at home and I wasn’t turning in my assigned book reports. My teacher, Mr. Ciarico, told me in front of the class that if I wrote and read a poem to the class each week he would give me an A for the class. I had been looking at a D or an F for not turning in my assignments. I readily agreed as I had already written enough poems to get me through to graduation. I enlisted into the Air Force 3 months after High School so that I wouldn’t get drafted in the Army and sent to Viet Nam. I didn’t write poetry during those years but when I got out in 1970 I had the GI Bill and I decided to take some classes at a Community College in Tucson. I didn’t want to take any classes that demanded lots of homework so I signed up for a creative writing class and a poetry class along with my freshman English class. A poet friend turned me onto James Tate’s The Lost Pilot book of poetry and I was enthralled and amazed by his poetry & I wanted to write like him. I was 23 y/o. There were excellent poets who were teaching at the University of AZ as well and they let me sit in on their classes without having to be an official student. That’s my story & I’m sticking to it.

Hi Niall, I just got back on Sunday after 10 days in Cambridge where my son lives. We peaked at 98 deg - way too much for me, given the Northern Ireland record high is only 87. I pity you with the baby.

I think there are many paths that lead to interest in poetry. We are genetically programmed to communicate, to scan for patterns, to test boundaries, to rise to challenges, to synthesise ideas and test them, and of course we dream and have to make sense of that. We are also culturally conditioned to treat some variations of these behaviours as rewarding, logically or aesthetically pleasing or in the extreme, as signs of illness. Poetry is driven and guided by these impulses and possibly others as a means of satisfying the highest needs of self-actualisation. Life of course is insistent with its demands and how one responds by giving time to reading and /or writing poetry gets thoroughly mashed up at times. What balance of influences got me interested is a bit of a mystery, or at least an ex post facto rationalisation. What weight attaches to the memory of my father quoting Burns or my mother reciting Lochinvar? What weight to being born on a farm rather than town and to being socialised late rather than early, casting me into a bit of an outsider role. I still experienced the tail-end of the pre-TV generation that made its own entertainment in neighbours’ houses – music, stories, recitations, general craic; and many pubs were more inclusively the same rather than themed and competitive. So poetry was initially entertainment though nowadays that criterion seems less important.

It was always in the air though. James Simmons taught at my school and sang his take on the recent news several days a week on BBC morning radio; this before he established the Poet’s House on Islandmagee and taught a Master’s programme there. At Queen’s I played bridge in the snack bar with Paul Muldoon and his then girlfriend, later wife (for a time) Anne-Marie Conway. I was always a scientist though and had never really got to grips with literature. When I started to read poetry seriously back then and made my first attempts at writing it was like an attempt to break a code that had puzzled me. It was a problem to be unlocked like religion. Neither came naturally but it seemed you were out of step if you admitted the fundamental principles escaped you. Eventually I cracked them both, discarded one and embraced the other for broadly the same reasons. As an enquirer after truth it seemed the answers didn’t lie in the surface story but lay in understanding fully what people meant and felt when they described phenomena. Poetry for me therefore has always been concerned with the poem as a means of accessing the inner life of the poet. Some detail of their outer life is essential therefore as a pointer, clarifier and contextualiser. All bios therefore are a fascination for me.

Since the poem is important for the truth it contains I lose interest when I detect ambiguous meanings and punctuation that leads to alternative/unintended readings. If I don’t know what is intended I can’t access the mind that conceived it or else I perceive it to be such a muddle that I will learn nothing from doing so. Found poems and other incidental and humorous work is all good grist to the mill though in the way wit and entertainment always is. I still get enjoyment too from the simple act of analysing and decoding what may be presented as an obscure piece of work.

It took me a long time to appreciate Seamus Heaney. Our rural backgrounds and the traditions we were familiar with overlapped so much that he just seemed to be writing about what was everyday. If he had an image of an old griddle leaning on a gable wall, I had the same image of one leaning on my grandmother’s wall. If he had encountered a bog-man in Denmark, my father had told me stories of what they had pulled out of bogs in Monaghan, if he endured army searches and blocked roads travelling home from Wicklow, we all endured them travelling the same route and many others. If religion made no difference to his farming neighbours, neither did it to ours. The troubles were for townies you didn’t want near the countryside. It was only when I reached the stage of looking back that I discovered the nuances and craft in the detail he chose to share. What helped me most though were his essays of criticism - the thematic approach he took picking apart authors across centuries and genres; how he put into words what made a poem a poem. He too knew the lives of the poets as well as their poems.

It is common values that hold any community together. When I wrote that the poem is a means of accessing the inner mind of the poet I think the emphasis for me is really on the values implicit there. Poems are often about the angst or emotion associated with the thousand decisions we make each day. Those decisions depict existential values in action. Where they are professed values, such as religious or political ones, I have no interest and stop reading, but where they illustrate and give insight to the commonality of experience I am drawn in to what Heaney refers to as the transcendent realm that is woven into poetry; not directly in the words but suffusing them. So, it may have involved a bit of a detour, but the answer to your question “what got me interested in poetry” was really a hankering for a community of shared values. The driver for that was my personal reaction to the environmental crises faced by the world in the 1960s and 70s, which was one of despair and rejection of establishment values. The magazines I subscribed to then were New Scientist, The Ecologist and The Anarchist Weekly, which about sums it up. Not surprising then that the first poets I was attracted to were the beat poets, but I have a natural antipathy to the polemical so drifted more towards individual identity and freedoms so eec became a major attraction. There have been many since, and the search goes on, half-heartedly now the utopian dreams have faded, but still bringing a little joy when the spirit of a poem sets my wind chimes tinkling.