Old Style
Old Style
Not just the lay-by, or the motorway
or its central reservation.
Not just the ring road, or the cul de sac
with its pretty forsythia border.
Not just the house, or its extension,
and its hundred windows shining away.
Instead the known world and the unseen,
to which you’ll come back:
that is, the point of departure, the destination,
and all points in between.
A free drift to nowhere in particular.
All that way, and back again.
Giant Forest
Thinking of poetry as style, having been asked to elaborate on or establish the setting for 'Old Style' I remembered the excitement when reading poetry began to coincide with writing poems. It was like stepping out of a downpour. Except it was a bright, warm day, May 1994. I had bought Derek Mahon’s Selected Poems and The Carrier of Ladders by WS Merwin. I remember the sunshine because I walked from the docks to the Claddagh in Galway city, to the football pitches and back, past the spot where there is now a plaque to Louis MacNeice. I didn’t know then about MacNeice’s Galway holiday. I bought an ice-cream and I read the Mahon book on Nimmo’s Pier that afternoon. I still think of it in a dazzle of sunlight.
At the university, Mahon was presented as the smartest and most stylish and modern of poets, Irish but also a bit Frenchified. Hard work, which I was ready for, feeling ‘a hunger to be more serious’, a hunger which was gratified by the austere cover quote from the leading Irish Studies academic, Seamus Deane. The cover painting, though, Max Ernst’s ‘La foresta imbalsamata’ told a different story: against a terrifying giant forest, a weirdly childish cut- out bird (a figure Ernst called Loplop) seemed to smile out at the reader. Is that style? How a developed sense of tone and rhythm remains or becomes evident when a writer takes on a welter of subjects or themes? Where style is flexible enough to co-exist, like Loplop, with these different subjects?
Another, related way of thinking about style, which the poem ‘Old Style’ alludes to, is Henry James’ statement that
The house of fiction has... not one window, but a million.... They have this mark of their own that at each of them stands a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least with a field-instrument, insuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct from any other.... The spreading field, the human scene is the "choice of subject"; the pierced aperture, either broad or balconied or slit-like and low-browed, is the "literary form"; but they are, singly or together, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher—without, in other words, the consciousness of the artist.
If style, in prose and in verse, is ‘the consciousness of the artist’, I was thinking about style when I admired how lightly Mahon writes about serious things, keeping his balance even as he shifts his reader’s attention from JP Donleavy’s Dublin (‘For the days are long – / from the first milk van / To the last shout in the night, An eternity. But the weeks go by / Like birds; and the years, the years / Fly past anti-clockwise / Like clock hands in a bar mirror’) to ‘Penhurst Place’ (‘the iron hand and the velvet glove—come live with me and be my love’) and the ‘Lost peoples of Treblinka and Pompeii’ in his most famous poem, ‘A Disused Shed in Co.Wexford’. The poems present readers with a geography and an orientation to that geography, as well as a totally distinctive music, precise and understanding, ironic and cool but attuned to the elemental and mischievous too: ‘First there is darkness, then somehow light /We call this day, and the other night’. It’s hard to stop quoting Mahon’s poems, but one other seems to catch the light which breaks across and out of his poems, like it should break out of any poem:
The sun rises in spite of everything
And the far cities are beautiful and bright.
I lie here in a riot of sunlight
Watching the day break and the clouds flying.
Everything is going to be all right.
*
I came to Mahon through ‘Irish Poetry’, a course taught using anthology and handouts by a young, temporary lecturer whom I would hear, once, enthusing about a Fugazi gig on the lit and littered footpaths of Salthill. Music steered students, and some of the lecturers, as much as literature. If studying English introduces caution to the judgment of poetry, conversations and arguments about music can continue , outside the lecture hall, with a fervour that remains enthusiastically evangelical. It was easier, as we read our way slowly through the canon, to have a position on new wave or alternative rock, to discuss with friends the difference between SLF and The Undertones. Discussions resembled lecture courses as they laid out arguments like a path through the woods. One friend would make a case for Irish rock music: he knew the difference between Mother Records and a major label, made telling discriminations between The Would-Bes and the Forget-Me-Nots, would relate their sound to a genealogy of recent English bands. Music and allowed a kind of a kind of buttonholing shorthand, a useful primer on style without subject.
The title of the poem ‘Old Style’ refers to one particular type of music but avoids, or wants to avoid, adopting a single
point of view or a simple touchstone of recognition: it translates the Irish term for traditional Irish unaccompanied singing, ‘sean nós’, a term which refers broadly to a singing tradition which emphasises the music rather than the lyric, highlighting tempo, intonation and ornamentation.
‘Old Style’ is also the first poem in my forthcoming book, Of All Places, and it sets up the idea that the book’s poems will enter the giant forest of the 21st century and its undergrowth, will range across geographical and historical expanses, the private life and the public sphere: what follows will be simultaneously grounded in the twenty-first century and alive to images and voices from the ancient and recent past; its readers will encounter Roger Casement, Batman, the last Yahi Indian, the cultures of Stonehenge and Tara, Yeats’s west of Ireland and on America’s west coast, and a former Taoiseach in the company of someone ‘who might be his daughter’. And the reader might ask, do the poems hang together through such detours and divagations? Will their ‘style’ and tones bear up in the poems’ different subjects, their situations and stories and circumstances?
In the year I first read Mahon seriously, and saw that poems could be written about almost anything, anthologies of Irish and American poetry replaced friends’ ‘various’ tapes. I made discovery after discovery, then discoveries within each discovery. But there was no NME or Hot Press or Q or Rolling Stone with potted histories, single reviews and tour photos. The figure of the poet was mysterious and ordinary, which seemed like an invitation to try it out. It was so private. Who were these people, visible nowhere? Had they really spent decades writing these poems which sometimes seemed present everywhere? Did they think it was worth it? One of these poets would tell me later about hearing his poem read by an actor on an arts show, a great, startling melodramatic aria of a poem, and the presenter asking, ‘Who wrote this? And where is he?’ The poet listened to this, vanishing from sight as the programme moved to its next item, continuing to do what he was doing, ironing his daughter’s clothes for school the next day, thinking maybe about where a poem begins and ends.
John McAuliffe was born in 1973 and grew up in Listowel, Co Kerry and now lives in Manchester. He won the RTE Poet of the Future award in 2000 and received a major Arts Council Bursary for first book A Better Life, which was shortlisted for a Forward Prize in 2002; Next Door was published in 2007 and The Gallery Press will shortly publish his third collection, Of All Places, which has received a PBS Recommendation for Autumn 2011. He teaches poetry at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester.