Culture That Made Me: Writer Paula Meehan selects her touchstones

Irish Examiner

7 hours ago

Born in 1955, Paula Meehan grew up in inner-city Dublin and Finglas. In 1984, she published Return and No Blame, the first of several acclaimed poetry collections. In 2013, she was installed as Ireland's professor of poetry by President Michael D Higgins. She has written plays for stage and radio, and her poetry has been set to music by Christy Moore, among others.
She will be at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, Monday, June 30, 10pm, for a collaboration with the Chiaroscuro Quartet at St Brendan's Church.
Jenny
A book that fired my imagination aged about six was Paul Gallico's Jenny. He wrote about the animal sphere. A young boy, Peter, wakes up and he's turned into a cat. He has fur and paws instead of hands. He strikes up a relationship with an older cat called Jenny. She teaches him how to be a cat, like how to reach the weird parts of his body with his tongue.
I remember some of the phrases from it, like 'When in doubt, wash'. They become sea cats, and they go off on great adventures. The book is so quirky, strange, and magical. I always loved the idea of turning into an animal.
Mark Twain
I was a bookish child. I was fed the classics. I loved Mark Twain's books.
Tom Sawyer, for instance, is raised by a religious, conservative aunt. I found myself living in a theocracy. I was beginning to read about the culture I was being raised in. We inherited the English class system, the minute calibrations of class.
Meehan says she loved author Mark Twain's books as a child. Picture: The Mark Twain House & Museum.
As a kid growing up, I became more aware of these gradations. Did you live in a tenement in the inner city or in a private house? It was tuppence looking down on a 'ha'penny. Systems oppressed people from my background. I related to Twain's characters, Tom and Huck, and their rebellious spirit.
Sean O'Casey
Sean O'Casey was a sublime dramatist. My roots go back into the heart of the north inner city, into Monto. I knew the characters in his tenement plays. They were all around me. They nourished me. His politics also nourished me. He had great empathy for women struggling in poverty.
What chimed with me about O'Casey's plays — and the characters in them, who break into a song at the drop of a hat — as I looked around, was you were only as good as your story.
If you've fuck-all else, then your ability to tell a story, and hold attention, sing a song, give a spiel or a raiméis, becomes your character. It's part of your stock in trade or your wealth.
The Confirmation Suit
I love Brendan Behan's story The Confirmation Suit. My mother was a gifted handywoman. She'd embroider, knit, and crochet. She cut down old coats for me, weird creations.
Paula Mehan says she loves Brendan Behan's story The Confirmation Suit. Picture:.
I was so ashamed going around in what I called in a poem once 'the stigma of the second hand'. The Confirmation Suit is a similar kind of realisation — Behan realising the woman who made (burial) shrouds made his confirmation suit.
He's mortified, but at her funeral, he walks in the rain, wearing the confirmation suit. That hit my heart — the children of the poor, the sense of shame at their poor clothes.
Joni Mitchell
When I was coming on 17, I listened to Joni Mitchell's album Blue [on a loop]. As teenagers in Finglas, we were music mad. Psychedelics were hitting our youth culture, and a lot of influence from American poets.
I remember going on a south of France festival tour with Colm Tóibín, back in the '90s, and we sang the whole Blue album together because we had it off by heart. Each song is gravened into my memory. I learned a lot of my poetry lines from her — how to hook a line, to stall a line, the force of a line. A master craftswoman.
Gary Snyder and the eastern mind
I love the American poet Gary Snyder. He was 95 in May. I dedicated my selected poems in Japanese to him. He had a huge influence on my young, hungry poetry mind. His essays from the '50s are still radical. He opened the door to Japanese poetry — like Bashō, the great haiku master — and to a rapturous love and understanding of nature. Through his studies in Zen Buddhism, he opened the eastern mind to me.
We were a very spaced-out generation, between books like Timothy O'Leary's The Politics of Ecstasy and Alan Watts — the great commentator on Buddhism — who wrote you must be careful of 'climbing up the signpost instead of following the road'.
Eavan Boland
Eavan Boland is a pure lyric singer. Her lines sing. I'm a dedicated lyric poet. The song in the poem is what turns me on.
Paula Meehan describes Eavan Boland, pictured, as "a pure lyric singer". Picture: Maura Hickey.
She stood up in the time when it was very difficult, as a woman poet, to have parity of esteem.
She banged the table. She challenged why all the grants went to the guys. She challenged the culture of publishing where if you opened anthologies, magazines, you would hardly see a woman's name. Now that has changed completely.
Thomas McCarthy
I'm a great fan of Thomas McCarthy, a seriously good poet based in Cork. I love his work. He's an unbelievable encourager. One of his early lines is his wish, 'to place art anonymously at the Earth's altar'. I love that sense of service.
In the folk tradition, you notice the number of times 'Anonymous' appears under lyrics, especially women's songs. To lose ego, to put all your devotion, craft, and intelligence into the poem itself, struck a note with me.
If you put all your energy like Native Americans and their medicine bundles, or indigenous people with their power objects, into making the thing as good and
powerful as you can, it will draw what you need to you.
Translations
Brian Friel's Translations is a great play for understanding the colonised mind. Hugh, the hedge-school master, heads off to join the rebellion with his sidekick. They're coming down from Donegal, walking the roads with their pikes on their shoulders, to meet the French in Sligo and revolt against the colonial master. There's a lovely line where he says: 'And it was there, in Phelan's pub, that we got homesick for Athens, just like Ulysses.'
Because they spoke Greek, Latin, and Irish, they got lost in the drink and Homer, and all the great playwrights. That spoke to me about how useless artists can sometimes be in the political realm and how useless political power can be in the artists' realm.
Z
I remember seeing Costa-Gavras' movie Z in The Screen cinema, an arthouse cinema in Dublin. It's a fantastic film. I studied Greek mythology and Greek theatre. I've hitched to Greece. I've come to a small village on a tiny island near the coast of Turkey a great deal of my adult life. I've gone probably to more islands than Odysseus himself on his way back from the Trojan war.
I love Z for the spirit of the Greek people, which I've loved from Neolithic times through classical times into the contemporary, and their resistance to Nazis and fascism in the civil war. I found expression of that in Costa-Gavras's movie.