Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

In Presiding Spirits, we ask a contemporary poet to write a poem drawing on work from the past. Theo Dorgan grew up with Irish being spoken around him in the port of Cork, the chief city of the province of Munster which covers Ireland’s south and south west. Born in 1953, Dorgan’s poetry collections include The Ordinary House of Love, Rosa Mundi, and Sappho’s Daughter. He was for many years Director of Poetry Ireland and has edited and co-edited numerous anthologies including, in English, Watching The River Flow and, in Irish, An Leabhar Mór: The Great Book of Gaelic. And his presiding spirit is Piaras Mac Gearailt who wrote the Irish classic Rosc Catha na Mumhan: the Battle Cry of Munster half way through the eighteenth century. Dorgan’s most recent book is Sailing for Home, a prose account of what happens when three experienced sailors and a novice (Dorgan) bring a modern 70-foot schooner back across the Atlantic to Ireland. His new poem for Magma, Gaffer, tells of a more recent meeting at sea with a much older yacht rigged with an ancient gaff mainsail that ceased to be the sailor’s first choice of rig sixty years or more ago.



GAFFER

She loomed up out of the near-dusk,
long-keeler, gaff-ketch, maybe
fifty yards off. Coursing along, the hullwash
whispering on her faded sides.
I roared at the crew in temper,
where did he come from, there on the lee?
what kind of watch are ye keeping?
Everyone shrugged, I sounded unfair.
Ducked my head back inside,
could see nothing on radar.

Hailed him, the solitary man on the wheel.
He turned to look over at us,
tilted the brim of his cap, stared
off ahead again. Behind and inshore
the bullvoice of Roches Point.
The wind was fresh, I had a reef in
but he was carrying full sail, kerosene
running lights in his rigging, flare
of his port light a flame on the worn mainsail.
I took him for English, out of Dorset or Cornwall.

He flew no flag but everything there before us
spoke of an earned authority,
someone who’d put in the years. For maybe an hour
he held station there beside us and
never again cast a glance in our direction.
As full dark came on we shook out the reef
and pulled ahead – light displacement, fin-keel,
the boat barely two years old. I wanted more
from this meeting than I could grasp, had sand
in my brain inside, some mind’s infection.

We were bound for Kinsale but off the Sovereigns
something came over me, a sudden desire
to be out of the wind. We made in
for Oysterhaven, picked up a mooring
and settled for the night. Over the south ridge
with its deep woods a sky of stars stood up.
I stood there smoking while down below
there was laughter, a burr of voices, a rattle of pans.
Somebody’s mobile rang, strident and wrong.

“Where do you think he is now?” Geoff, coming up.
We turned to the scribble of surf
in the harbour mouth, half-expecting a sail
to blank the cottage lights. He must be staying out,
I said, making on for the west. The last red overhead faded,
a land breeze came up, smelling of leafmould.
Geoff rapped the coachroof with a knuckle, looked out
and away, said “Forecast is good, he’ll be okay.”
I don’t suppose, I said, the weather bothers him.


The gaff rig sported by Theo Dorgan’s mysterious fellow sailor in Gaffer was the commonest sail plan for a small Irish or English boat throughout the nineteenth century. But it was a poem in Irish about an even earlier type of wooden warship
that first showed a youthful Dorgan the power of poetry. Talking to Mick Delap in Dublin, Dorgan admitted Rosc Catha na Mumhan: the Battle Cry of Munster, was not that great a poem!

It was one of the Irish language poems we learnt at school, when I was thirteen or maybe younger. Piaras Mac Gearailt (“son of Gerald”, so anglicized as Fitzgerald) was born near Youghal in County Cork in Ireland’s southern province of Munster in 1705. His people lost most of their lands in the aftermath of King William’s advent into Ireland, but Clann Mac Gearailt managed to retain a small fraction of their acres by turning Protestant. This poem, Rosc Catha na Mumhan, longs for deliverance to come from the Continent where the Gaelic aristocracy were in exile. It was composed about 1750 and in many ways it’s unremarkable, except for the power of its rhythm in the original Irish – four strong beats to the line – and the onomatopoeic crash and hiss of the sea in the lines of the refrain. All of which makes it extraordinarily difficult to render happily into English – but here’s my attempt (at the opening two stanzas, and the last two, of eight):

      Suddenly I knew by the freezing cold
      And the storm waves pounding down in the cove,
      By the voice of the songbirds loud and brave
      That Caesar was coming to his native shore.

      Happy for Munster the glorious sound
      And for all who endure on their native ground,
      Thunder of the waves on ships of the brave
      Pulling powerfully towards us under towers of sail...

      Rare is the morning when at break of day
      I don’t go running to the edge of the land 
      My wide-open eyes searching sea and sky
      For the first of the fleet to come crashing towards shore.

      Happy for Munster the glorious sound,
      The sons and daughters of her banished kings
      Thunder of the brave as they break through foaming wave
      Pulling powerfully towards us under towers of sail.

I have to say, with a scrupulous regard for your English readers, Mac Gearailt’s poem really has little to recommend it! What first caught me in the Irish, though, were the lines that make up the poem’s refrain:

      Torann na dtonn le sleasaibh na long
      Ag tarraingt go teann inár gceann fé sheol.

   That Torann na dtonn… it’s the thunder of a wave slapping the wooden walls that were the sides of a large mid-eighteenth century warship. Then le sleasaibh na long… the water slipping by. And Ag tarraignt go teann inár gceann fé sheol… “Strongly pulling towards us under full sail” would be the literal thing. But there’s the tension of every cord, and every sheet, every rope, every purchase straining and stretched, that’s captured in the sound of the Irish; those open vowels, and the “shhhhh” sounds, pulling and pushing at the sentence; all the forces in play when a large three master is pulling towards you, all there in the Irish. The sea is the thing! And what I thought was magic in that poem when I was a child was how you can enact the thing itself in the sound.

But what’s the significance of the sea today? Hasn’t there been a big shift over the past couple of generations in the way the majority of people regard the sea?

Certainly. Most people do not expect to be on the sea these days except for short ferry hops. But still the sea is a palimpsest of all our great vulnerabilities – so that a different quality of attention is paid to, say, the loss of five fishermen off Howth Head, compared to the same number of deaths in traffic accidents, or in a hotel fire. Maybe it’s the amniotic memory! But there is something about the sea that speaks more directly to the imagination. It has that paradoxical thing: it changes, and it’s never still; it’s constantly in flux. But it’s always the sea.

We may be in for a shock, though. We’ve always thought of the sea as inviolate – and yet now we are beginning to realize what harm we are doing to the sea.

As far back as Thor Heyerdahl – those awful photos of rafts of rubbish in the middle of the ocean. And now it’s universal. We sailed 4000 miles from Antigua to Ireland with the fishing line out every day. You’d expect maybe one strike a day. We had just the one tuna! That spoke to me a bit.

And will that change the way we write about the sea?

Oh, it will. Sooner or later, we’ll feel guilt and betrayal at what we’ve done.

But most modern poetry I see about the sea is fairly sentimental, fairly backward looking. Has anyone yet grasped, in poetic terms, what’s happening to the sea?

I can’t think of anyone, offhand. This is one of the things that’s struck me very forcefully, in the six or seven years since, out of nowhere, I took up sailing! I’ve been astonished to discover how little poetry of the sea there is. And how little of it reflects the sea as it actually is. You’ll get people who’ll write derivatives of derivatives, that generally hark back to the period of empire bombast. Or the romantic search for a new life: “Oh my America, my new found land”! In Ireland the decent sea poetry is almost all in Irish, from the seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth centuries. Among the living Irish poets, the only one who’s written with any ambition about the sea is Richard Murphy, with Sailing to an Island. Murphy had his traditional Galway hooker rebuilt, and sailed her, and wrote very wittily about what a bad sailor he was to start with. But according to the Connemara men you talk to, “Ah, he wasn’t bad by the end of it.” Which is high praise! And that’s one reason I did my Atlantic trip – to begin to learn the same things: the monotony of it, how to stand your watch, and so on.

And English poets like Masefield, they knew the monotony, and the occasional terror, of being at sea …

And Stevenson. He knew sail. Masefield knew how to chip rust – the monotonous afternoons, tap tapping away.

You don’t sense that in most of today’s writing about the sea.

If you and I were to put together an anthology of contemporary poetry of the sea, it would be a very slim volume. And it’s almost always the sea seen from the land.

Getting back to your own poem, Gaffer, and your much earlier fascination with Rosc Catha na Mumhan: Battle Cry of Munster, does that appreciation of sound still stand at the heart of your
writing?

A nucleus of sound is part of it. It’s a kind of glossalalia, running around in the back of the head most of the time. Carlos Castaneda calls it the internal dialogue. And you dip into that from time to time. Different poems have a different kind of genesis. But generally there’s a phrase – and almost always it’s a heard phrase.

Let’s look at Gaffer more closely.

I worry that it might be a bit too self-conscious. But it’s too new, it’s only just finished. So I won’t know for another five years or so.

Is that something you find, that poems will come back at you, and tell you something about themselves?

Oh yes. And very often a thing you have doubts about will strengthen over the years, and you’ll be very glad you gave it the benefit of the doubt. Because it will suddenly turn out to have Kenyan legs; it’s a long distance runner! And something that seems to you perfectly acceptable when you publish it, you’ll come to it again three or four years later, and you’ll say, that’s fraudulent. I don’t know about this one. I did make one great mistake with it – there was another verse at the end of it that was trying to draw a moral. And I suddenly thought that that’s because somewhere in here was a paradigm; it’s based on some model I haven’t recognized yet. And there must have been another thump on the drum at the end. And I put it away just far enough, that when I went back to it, I realized I didn’t need it.

You say the poem arose out of a particular sailing trip you made recently in a small modern yacht out from Cork – when you realized that, as a result of the sea miles you’d been putting in, you were beginning to react more instinctively as a helmsman to changing conditions.

And that started me thinking about the old boys you’d see, who are moving in a different time frame to us: steadier, slower. They’re not jumping at anything. But much more efficient – they’re ready for sea much quicker than you are. They couldn’t probably quote two consecutive pieces of theoretical advice to you. But they just know it because they’ve put in their sea miles. So there’s that set of meditations rolling along in the back of your head. And it makes you think a great deal about what we come to know about language. If you are working with words, you can’t pick it up out of a book or an MFA course; you learn by doing, by being immersed in the language. And then next I remember realizing one night (not for the first time) that there is no such thing as time: that we live of course with the absolute and necessary fiction of linear time, but that there is no such thing as time in the sense that once it’s passed, it’s gone. That the sea is still full of ancient three masters, four masters, old schooners. That they are all there at the same time. And you see them more at sea because it’s so stripped down. It’s easier to make room in your imagination for a ship that’s there, but not there, than it is to have a coach and four driving sideways through a bus! There’s too much going on in the city.

The sea hasn’t been built on. It looks as it did.

Yes. And is carrying still all the freights it ever carried. They are all still sailing in some sense. They’re not crowding each other out yet. Then, thirdly, I thought, there are days out there when the visibility is very deceptive. Is that boat alongside you there or not? I think we’d had a day like that. And sometime soon after, that drifted across the radar, and it connected to the other things. And Gaffer came up.

How did you write it, once you had the sense of it?

Unusually enough for me, it came out verse by verse by verse, in the order it appears in on the page. That doesn’t often happen . Very often it’s more like a shotgun blast, and you have to go and disentangle things, and figure out the order. Because we don’t think in a linear way, we think in concentric ways.

And it came out in the stanzas?

Yes. Nine lines to a stanza. I think it came like this because once the poem started, the steadying memory that came was of the actual voyage we made: the sea state, with big waves, gave our trip its own rhythm, of hesitancy and progress, hesitancy and progress. And that’s rolling underneath the poem, rather than any regular metre. If you were to try and put a regular metre on something like this, you’d kill it stone dead. There is a steady rhythm to the sea, but it shifts and varies. And there is a very steady rhythm to this poem, but there isn’t a fixed metre. I love that, because that’s how I’ve been writing all my life. I always have a rhythm, and a very steady rhythm, in the back of my head. But it’s not always obvious from the page. You have to speak it to get it.

And do you speak it yourself?

Oh yes, the vocal quantity is crucial. It happens to be a way that works for me. The danger is that, if you can’t speak it, you’re not rooting it in the body. And if you don’t root a poem in the body, it can become no more than a set of glib attitudes. Gary Snyder says, all poetry begins in the breath, and I think he’s absolutely right.

So this isn’t mechanical rhythm?

Absolutely not. It’s lodging it in the body. It’s the exact sense I get when I’m standing at the wheel of a sailing boat, and the sails are well trimmed, and she’s pulling like a train. And a finger tip is all you need to steady her up. It’s a perfect illustration, because if you know not to use more than a finger tip either way, then you know how to turn a line in a book. Or vice versa.