A Statement of Purpose

I have received some positive feedback from my “Bog and Tower” paper so I wanted to provide a little more background on how and why I went to Ireland.  Here is my James W. Meyer Grant Application.  I have achieved some of these goals, many are still unfinished, ground left unearthed:

In 2005, I walked into a bookstore and selected a book of poems.  Strangely, it was Jay Parini’s quotation on the back cover that grabbed my attention. On the back of Seamus Heaney’s Opened Ground, Jay’s endorsement read: “The poems stay in the mind, which is the one essential feature of major poetry.” The poems have stayed in my hands and my mind ever since. I have carried the book to four continents. Yet despite reading and rereading Heaney’s poems and essays, I feel excluded from something in his poetry—a sense of place, the experience of Ireland, is vividly tied into his work, and I have never stepped foot on Irish soil.

I continued writing at Andover, under the aegis of an in the flesh Irish poet, Ted Deppe. There I discovered Yeats, Paul Muldoon, and spent a semester reading Joyce’s Ulysses. I fell in love with Irish poetry and prose. There was something in the diction, the sense of experimentation rooted in a formalist tradition, the mix of the political and the poetic, and there is the land itself inspiring poetry as it reflects back the work of past poets. I hope to better understand Irish poetry by exploring Ireland for the month of January with the aid of a Grant W. Meyer Fund grant.

What do I intend to research and report on while in Ireland? I have a sense that Irish poetry is uniquely tied to the country. It is no mistake that Paul Muldoon’s first publication was entitled Knowing My Place, for it is the knowledge of place that gives rise to such rich meaning in Irish poetry. Heaney speaks of his County Derry home as an omphalos, the navel, the stone marking the world’s center, and the sound of the communal water pump of his childhood. His poetry is deeply centered in the reality of Northern Ireland: the landscape, the people, and the history. Muldoon, Yeats, and Joyce are equally tied to Ireland, despite the fact that they all left the country for significant periods of time. Place in Irish poetry combines the music of the name, the physical fact of the land and in its history, and the ideal or abstract version of the place created by the poem. Heaney’s “Sweeney in Flight” creates a sense of Ireland by tying these three elements together: “I prefer the re- / echoing belling of a stag / among the peaks / to that arrogant horn // … // the stag of high Slieve Felim, / the stag of the steep Fews, / the stag of Duhallow, the stag of Orrery, / the fierce stag of Killarney. // The stag of Islandmagee, Larne’s stag, / that stag of Moylinny, / the stag of Cooley, the stag of Cunghill, / the stag of the two-peaked Burren.” Surrounding the deep tremolo of “stag”, there is a music of place. I fear that, given my ignorance of Ireland, entire cadenzas and hemiolas have passed inaudibly before my ears.

For my project, I would travel all across Ireland to cities and sites made famous by Irish poems and poets. To better understand Yeats, I would visit Coole Park, Thoor Ballylee, and Drumcliff Churchyard where “Ben Bulben sets the scene”. Travelling to Thoor Ballylee, I could witness for myself the source of “The Winding Stair” and “The Tower Poems.” I could attempt to decipher whether the poems bear the marks of their surrounding or if, as Heaney suggests, the poems create “a country of the mind” separate from the physical place overlaid onto the surroundings. Is it the place that gives rise to the abstractions in Yeast’s poems (as in the turning staircase of the Tower and the “widening gyre” of “The Second Coming”)? Or does Yeats’s poetry create the Tower as I would see it?
To better understand Heaney’s work, I would travel to Northern Ireland, to the country of his birth, County Derry. I would trace my way through the bucolic Ireland he has immortalized visiting Anhorish, Brough, Toome, and Moyola. I would also spend time at the Seamus Heaney Center for Poetry at Heaney’s alma mater Queens University in Belfast, where I would delight in meeting the current director.

While in Belfast I would also visit the Ulster Museum, where I could find paintings like Sir John Lavery’s “Daylight Raid from My Studio Window” that have inspired the ekphrastic poetry of Derek Mahon. I also want to plumb how the changing face of Northern Ireland alters the meaning of recent Irish poetry. What does it mean to read Mahon’s “Everything Is Going to Be All Right,” in a peaceful Belfast? Is the poem reconciled with a peaceful world or does it depend in some way upon “the Troubles”? What does it mean to read the lines, “There will be dying, there will be dying, / but there is no need to go into that” today and how would Irish citizens react to the poem today?

In the pursuit of so many prominent Irish writers, I would travel to Dublin. To research Joyce, I would visit the Joyce Museum in Martello Tower and look down at the “snotgreen sea,” before poking my way over to the James Joyce Centre. Of course Dublin has also hosted Yeats, Shaw, Kavanagh, and Heaney. I could sit beside Kavanagh’s statue along the Grand Canal and contemplate “Canal Bank Walk,” and look for that bird “gathering materials for the nest for the Word / Eloquently new and abandoned to its delirious beat.”

I would also seek out the Irish landscape. Poets like Mahon and Heaney are quick to conjure up meadows of herbs and beauty that ripen our appreciation of nature. I want to see what all of the fuss is about. Is it an accessible beauty? Is it created within the poetry for effect or does it stand alone? Perhaps January is not the most picturesque of months but any place holds a winter beauty.

Another goal of mine would be to meet and interview current Irish poets. I would like to hear how they conceive of the Irish poetic tradition, how important is it to be in Ireland when writing of Ireland, and how they believe the Irish country has shaped their own writing.

Beyond this, I wish to surrender myself to Ireland for a month, to discover new poets, poems, and places. In addition to writing my essay on relationship between Irish poets and the sense of place, I also hope to write my own poems, to expand my “word-horde.” I would greatly appreciate this opportunity to go and grow abroad. Thank you for your time and consideration.