Balancing Acts: Conversations with Gerald Dawe on a Life in Poetry

By Irish Academic Press

Balancing Acts gathers together interviews and conversations between Gerald Dawe and a wide cast of interlocutors between 1995 and 2020. Drawn from exchanges on television and radio, print and online media, these conversations with fellow poets, critics, journalists, colleagues and friends, are a testament to Dawe’s generous, open-hearted and open-minded approachability as a poet for whom the ‘artful way of making’ poetry has always been informed by an attitude of just ‘getting on with it’. In the same way that memory, for him, is ‘not just about the past’ but involves ‘a route into the present’, these fascinating interviews and conversations provide an insight into the poet on the go, in the process of making unforgettable poetry happen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Irish Academic Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781788558150

Book preview

Preface

In an interview with Andrea Rea, first published online in 2014, Gerald Dawe proposed that ‘Poetry … is not about easy sentiment.’ Meditating on the ‘complicated business’ of memory, he said: ‘it’s not just about the past; it’s about finding a route into the present as well and making necessary adjustments and judgements and then getting on with it. Poetry is an artful way of making that happen.’

Balancing Acts gathers together interviews and conversations between Dawe and a wide cast of interlocutors between 1995 and 2020. Drawn from exchanges on television and radio, print media and the internet, these dialogues with fellow poets, critics, journalists, colleagues and friends, are a testament to Dawe’s generous, open-hearted and open-minded approachability as a poet for whom the ‘artful way of making’ poetry has always been informed by an attitude of just ‘getting on with it’. In the same way that memory, for him, is ‘not just about the past’ but involves ‘a route into the present’, his interviews and conversations provide an insight into the poet on the go, in the process of making poetry happen. In this regard, they provide essential insights into the poet’s work and working life, his attunement to what Dermot Bolger has called ‘the exactitudes of local experience and their universal counterpoints’.

These poles of reference (the ‘local’ and the ‘universal’) suggest the broad coordinates of Dawe’s aesthetic mapping of the world, so often delineated throughout his poems. Think of a poem like ‘Little Palaces’, with its discrete images of urban ordinariness: ‘an orchard and allotments,/broken window frames, pigeon-huts/on stilts …’ But then, a few lines later, Dawe writes: ‘Everything/is right with the world;/even the kerbstones are painted.’ Poems like this are remarkable balancing acts in themselves, of perception and attention, visual detail and sonic grace. There is a risk involved here, at once formal and historical, demanding that the poet strikes just the right note in his attempt to represent particularities of place and time.

So, too, in his interviews and conversations, Dawe provides precise but probing answers to serious questions about his poetry and the contexts of its composition. Self-reflective, immensely knowledgeable, authoritative without ever being dogmatic, they display the kind of ‘tact’ that Terence Brown has noted in Dawe’s critical work. Taken together, they provide an indispensable supplement to readers interested in the poet’s art but also in his development as one of the most prolific and even-handed critics of his generation. Balancing Acts is a guidebook through the routes of the poet’s memory and experience, but it is also a celebration of Dawe’s voice as he has sought to navigate the often precarious pathways of Irish and international history, poetry, politics and the academy.

Philip Coleman

Trinity College Dublin, 2022

Introduction

Growing up in north Belfast one becomes profoundly aware of two geographical features: the hills behind and the lough in front. If the water might provide hints of opportunity and departure, the encircling hills imply both protection and enclosure. Gerald Dawe’s biography affirms that birth under the shadow of Ben Madigan is a profoundly different experience to commemoration beneath Ben Bulben. His mission as poet, critic and memoirist affirms the desire to tell this story honestly without camouflage or subterfuge. At a time when there is considerable anxiety regarding the obscuration of certain narratives in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland by processes of history that emerge in what is hoped is a post-conflict society, his writing stands as a testament to the writer’s role in affirming the lived experience of the individual.

Dawe’s Protestant background has fascinated interviewers and many conversations, especially those during the Troubles and in the years immediately following the signing of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement. While other observers may have sought to provide an apologia for a particular ideological or sectarian position, Dawe aimed to elucidate an experience of life that was most definitely his and most decidedly against the normal point-scoring exercises. The narration of his early family life, his education and his eventual departure from Northern Ireland has remained a focus for discussion. Preludes to a life are of course the stuff that poets are made of, but Northern Protestant preludes have remained significant on an island in which the worlds, lives and experience of this variegated faith and cultural community may appear remote and unknowable to those from outside the tradition. As a poet and prose-writer, Dawe’s sensitive and articulate explication of the culture in which he was raised provides readers with a means to enter this world and learn more about its thoughts, rhythms and preoccupations.

However, what remains paramount is that Dawe should not be understood merely as a cultural interpreter, or even as a cypher for the Protestant way of life. While this element of his work has been examined in many of the conversations in this book, other forces and foci emerge – notably his curiosity and intellectual energy, and his desire for the discovery of the new and to keep moving. If his early years provided a house under the Antrim hills with the mantelpiece clock ticking out the moments of a 1950s’ and 1960s’ childhood and adolescence, this also provided a space for him to fill with the discovery of books and music. In ways very similar to Derek Mahon’s speaker in the poem ‘Courtyards in Delft’, there is a sense of the dreaming figure that emerges from the neatness and order of Unionist post-war Northern Ireland to fix on verse. But unlike Mahon, who grew up not far from Dawe, there is not the sense of suffocation in those streets, backyards and neat gardens. It is telling perhaps that Dawe was born approximately a decade after Mahon in 1952 and his Belfast was one influenced by the 1960s’ sense of optimism and possibility that was not as apparent in the greyer, more constricting 1950s. We learn from him of the writers and musicians who inspired an insatiable desire for words and music. This will provide much for those who enjoy sleuthing through a writer’s list of favourite writers to see how the reading of one connects to the writing of another. Dawe’s list will not disappoint. As one might expect from someone whose adult life has been caught up in creative and critical writing and the sharing of this in classroom, lecture hall and public arena, we are presented with a dizzying bibliography. From this lifetime of engaging with, writing of and exploring through books, we are provided with glimpses into the author’s reading and the networks and individuals that Dawe has moved among. While those seeking the lurid or sensational will be disappointed, those seeking thoughtful and important analyses of a range of authors from Ireland and far beyond will be rewarded. Insights are offered on the generations of significant Irish writers who have emerged from the 1960s onwards. Dawe has traversed an incredible range of terrain from the Glengormley salon of Padraic Fiacc to the Moon-Viewing room of Shisen-do in Kyoto, rubbing shoulders with many artists along the way. If, at times, his Northern capacity for doughty critique has hit home too assiduously, and he stands as one of the finest interpreters in Irish letters, his generosity and capacity for engagement has shone through even brighter. Fired in the same mother-city as Van Morrison, of whom he remains one of the most perceptive commentators, he is simultaneously at home and an outsider, his work a series of balancing acts to seek a creative and personal equilibrium.

This collection traces a lifetime of conversations. The narrative journey, fitting for an individual so closely bound by an appreciation of the workings of time, charts the natural chronological progression of when the interviews took place. The book underscores this by following the pathway of a life that begins in north Belfast, moves through books and the world of teaching to conclude with more recent discussions. This section is ironically entitled ‘retro’ because many of the discussions stem from the time after his ‘official’ retirement from Trinity College Dublin. In essence there is nothing ‘retro’ about Gerald Dawe’s current work nor is there any sense of him being retired. It may at times be the case that he is engaged in what might appear to be retrospection, but that is because current debates on society, culture, politics and the arts require deft handling of the past in order to craft a better future. It is a matter of balancing acts.

Gerald Dawe was born in Belfast in 1952 and educated at Orangefield Boys’ School, the College of Business Studies in the city and the (New) University of Ulster at Coleraine. He was awarded a Major State Award from the Northern Ireland Education and Library Board in 1974 and moved to Galway, where he wrote his thesis on William Carleton. He was a tutor and assistant lecturer in English in NUI Galway from 1977 until 1987 and was appointed Lecturer in English at Trinity College Dublin in 1988. He is Professor of English and Fellow Emeritus, Trinity College, having retired in 2017.

He was founder-director of the Trinity Oscar Wilde Centre (1998–2015), John J. Burns Professor in Irish Studies at Boston College, Charles Heimbold Professor at Villanova University, Philadelphia, and Visiting Scholar, Pembroke College, Cambridge. He is a recipient of the Macaulay Fellowship in Literature, Hawthornden Writers Fellowship, Ledig-Rowohlt International Writers’ Fellowship, Arts Council of Ireland Poetry Awards and a Moore Institute Fellowship, NUI Galway. He served on the original board of Poetry Ireland and Theatre Ireland, and was founder of Trio: Modern Poetry in Performance. He has also been a board member of The Irish Writers Centre, The Abbey Theatre (Shareholders), Literature Ireland, the Centre for Literary Translation (TCD) and the Seamus Heaney Centre Advisory Board (QUB), and was co-chair and chair of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature selection committee. He has been on the judging panel of the William Allingham Poetry Prize, the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award, the Irish Times Poetry Now Award, the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Rupert & Eithne Strong New Poet Award.

Since the early 1980s, Gerald Dawe has contributed to poetry and literary festivals worldwide and been a speaker at academic and civic conferences on Irish and European intellectual and cultural history and traditions in many other countries, including Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the Netherlands, Italy and Germany, as well as in the US, Japan and Australia.

While working as an assistant lecturer in NUIG in the 1970s, he established ‘Starting to Write’ workshops throughout the west of Ireland, and founded and edited for five years Writing in the West, a monthly literary supplement published by the leading regional newspaper, The Connacht Tribune (1979–85). In Galway he also founded Krino: The Review (1986–96) and guest-edited several Irish poetry special issues, including Threshold (Belfast), Stand (Newcastle), Paris/Atlantic and The Literary Word (Belgrade).

As director of the Irish Studies Summer School at Trinity College (1991–2000) he contributed to courses on Irish literature, drama and creative writing for numerous North American university programmes based in Ireland from the mid-1980s, including Arkansas, NYU, Iowa, Creighton and Carlow, as well as coordinating the literature programme at the Institute of Public Administration (Dublin) for many years. He has contributed reviews and articles to most of Ireland’s leading broadsheets and literary and academic journals, including, at one time, an arts column with The Irish Times; more recently he has been reviewing for the Dublin Review of Books and Reading Ireland.

Dawe has broadcast on RTÉ, BBC Northern Ireland, BBC Radio 3 and 4, and Lyric FM. He presented ‘The Poetry Programme’ for RTÉ and, with Chris Spurr, wrote and presented for BBC Radio 3 ‘A Last Inheritor’ on the legacy of W.B. Yeats, which was chosen by the BBC as one of its best millennial radio programmes. Three radio documentaries – ‘Home Thoughts’, with Eleanor Shanley, ‘Crossing the Sound’ and ‘From Kingstown to Dún Laoghaire’ – featuring his poetry, with contributions from his contemporaries, have been produced by Rockfinch for the Lyric Feature series on Lyric FM.

In celebration of Gerald Dawe’s achievements and contribution to Irish Letters, an online and physical exhibition, ‘Gerald Dawe: Cultural Belongings’, based upon the extensive archive of his papers held at the John J. Burns Library, Boston College, and curated by Dr Frank Ferguson with the digital artist Paul Marshall, has been travelling through various centres in Ireland and abroad throughout 2022 and 2023.

Frank Ferguson

One Origins

Catching the Light

with Niall McGrath

The Regency Hotel, Belfast, 1995

NMG: There is a preoccupation in your early poems with destinations. Do you see this as a Calvinist influence from your background?

GD: I would never have thought of Calvin. No. Destinations?

NMG: Some of the poems also refer to being in Presbyterian church halls. Wasn’t that part of your background?

GD: I don’t think any of my work is consciously looking for destination or has any sense of going somewhere. I have tried to write poems that are like Victorian silhouettes. Clearly etched and edged in. You get that kind of stillness and clarity when you go into a church. But there aren’t many poems about churches.

NMG: Maybe because in Sheltering Places¹ you were moving from the North to the South of Ireland and …?

GD: Yes, well now, in Sheltering Places that’s a different story, because the poems were written when I wasn’t sure that I could write. There is an attempt in Sheltering Places to respond in some way to the eruption of the Troubles. I think the notion of the Protestant thing came much later on, when I started to think about my background. I’d been very dismissive and critical of it when I was a younger man; in fact I hated it! It took me a while to grow out of that and to think a little more sympathetically of where I’d come from.

NMG: Illness and fragility seem to be recurrent motifs (e.g. in ‘From Two’). Do you see physical vulnerability and temporality as major aspects of life?

GD: As a boy, I did suffer from asthma and a family break-up and moving from one part of town to another. And I was unwell at a certain time in my very young years. Some of that shadows the early poems.

NMG: In ‘Straws in the Wind’, in Sunday School,² ‘… night-things bombard/our fragile peace’. It’s a very personal poem; isn’t it about physical vulnerability?

GD: There’s a sense of vulnerability and delicacy behind the domestic poems. I often feel that there’s an arrogance that people live in and that people live on, irrespective of troubles, even though the ‘now’, the present, can be a very delicate time. I was trying to convey fragility in ‘Straws in the Wind’. Fragility: a sense in which we can ceremonialise ourselves, and yet, here’s a young baby who was unwell, and maybe we should spend more attention on the here and now, rather than some other kind of ambition or grand schemes.

NMG: Why did you first write?

GD: I didn’t bother much submitting to magazines when I first went to university to study literature. Someone asked me for some poems for the university magazine. The actor Denys Hawthorne of the BBC visited the University of Ulster and read them and broadcast a few. One thing led to another. But I’ve always been a little uneasy about the public side of writing.

NMG: Who do you see as your most important literary influences?

GD: I just enjoy so many writers, it’s difficult to pinpoint a few central presences. But if I had to – the most important Irish writer for me is Yeats. I’m very impressed by Eugenio Montale. There’s a tremendous intelligence at work in his poems, and his sense of being in the world – I enjoy that. Montale writes about music and art. There’s none of the kind of confinement that is often the case in Irish writing; our cramped quality. Robert Lowell: I love his For the Union Dead and Near the Ocean.

NMG: You don’t use traditional forms very often. Do you think they’re more or less irrelevant now?

GD: Oh no! I was reading something recently that Michael Longley, a poet whom I admire a lot, has said that he would love to be able to write like Frank O’Hara and by the time he’s worked on the poem it becomes a Michael Longley poem. Well, I’ve often wanted to write like a Ginsberg or a Walt Whitman, those big elaborate lines and so on. And sometimes I’ve tried it, but it always ends up in this slightly more compressed form. It depends what you’re making comparisons with. I wouldn’t see myself as being a traditionalist in terms of my attitude to form; yet at the same time I wouldn’t see myself as being ‘loose’. So I suppose the poems just make their own kind of register, whatever form that may take. They’re worked on quite a bit.

NMG: In ‘The Lundys Letter’ it says: ‘You staged the ultimate coup de grâce/for the Union’s son turned republican’. You said there was a rebellion against your background at that period …?

GD: Several people have asked me about that, if it is myself I’m referring to; in fact, the poem’s actually addressed to Ronnie Bunting, who was killed by loyalists but who had been at school with us. And I’ve been thinking about it; maybe I should have identified that fact. I think there are a few of those poems in the middle part of The Lundys Letter³ which are trying to establish a watershed. I didn’t know it at the time, but what the poem was really trying to do was gather together my experience in Belfast in the ’60s and try and make some sense of it. And in effect it was a watershed. Having written that poem, and I’m still not 100 per cent happy with the last part of it, I think it freed me of something; maybe the kind of sombre, one-dimensional quality that I had to break through to move somewhere else. It’s not a political poem; it’s more like a memoir.

NMG: It talks of ‘an amalgam of desperate love/and politics’. Are you looking back on that period from a different perspective?

GD: Yes; though I’ve always been a little bit worried about this looking back business.

NMG: The ’60s was a time of social revolution. Yet that poem was written in the more conservative era of the ’80s. How do you view this aspect of it?

GD: That’s spot on, because part of ‘The Lundys Letter’ links in with ‘Blueprints’ in Sunday School. I always try to make a book a book; it’s interlinked, and one poem feeds off another. I think what I was saying both in ‘Lundys’ and ‘Blueprints’ was that in some way in the late ’60s – and I’m not being nostalgic or sentimental – that time was the last chance that a lot of people felt they had to change the world, to actually change the reality in which they lived. And of course that’s a marvellous sensation.

NMG: They had optimism; felt they could do something; whereas now, people are more … pragmatic?

GD: Yes, what happened then, I think, is that that ideal was defeated by the violence here and elsewhere. Here, the physical terrorist violence; but also in Britain by the violence of the Thatcher years. Which I think was devastation. Defeat takes different forms: it takes the slow, Chinese drip of the Thatcher reaction or the kind of bloody violence we’ve experienced in Ireland. There was a naivety about my generation, who thought that they could actually change things, because there are solid realities which you can’t move around. It takes some other process. And it has taken us, regrettably, a generation to realise that.

NMG: In ‘A Question of Covenants’ you focus on 28 September 1913, that’s a year after Ulster Day – when Lord Carson’s Solemn League and Covenant was signed in Belfast and across the North. Why?

GD: It should be 1912. But because of Yeats’ poem ‘September 1913’, none of us proofing picked up the mistake, a rare mistake. But it happens.

NMG: Carson is seen in this poem as ‘a stranger to both sides’. Is that satirising or criticising him because he was in reality a very neurotic and nervous man, despite his resolute public image?

GD: I don’t think he really understood what was going on.

NMG: He was caught up in a power game?

GD: Exactly. He was an actor. And he didn’t really understand the people here, either Protestant or Catholic. And he certainly didn’t understand the whole ethos of the North; but he could turn it to his advantage. So when I used that phrase ‘a stranger to both sides’, I was actually also thinking of the sides of the Lough, north and south, and how that whole kind of thing was endemic. That he didn’t really understand what was