an interview with Medbh McGuckian

Contemporary Verse 2: How do you write a poem? What is the process you go through?

Medbh McGuckian: I write a poem not just when I feel like it but after a certain time has elapsed since the last one, which for me makes it time to write again. So far I have always been able to keep going, except when I did not live here, when I was away for four months in America. For me a poem doesn’t usually begin with an idea, although sometimes it can. If I have been commissioned to write or something has happened, like the most recent poem I wrote in response to a sudden family death. My poems often begin with a desire to give myself the fun, pleasure, and delight of writing one or the process of getting into the mood to write one. Writing like we are doing here in this interview is not the same kind of thing, since here the mind is only thinking, not creating anything. For me the process of writing a poem begins with linking a few words oddly together, that, and that those words mean something poetically, not logically. Then it begins to form itself into a sequence of sentences that seem to tell a story or examine something. Really what I try to do is combine phrases to make the most startling juxtapositions. Then I try to make it more interesting as I read it over. For instance, in the poem I mention above, I wrote “the shy” and that was boring, so I changed it to the “willow-pattern shy” because of the death and another image of leaves. It mostly works in this way because this is what I enjoy doing.

CV2: What do you see as being the relationship between poetry and place?

MM: I only seem to write when rooted in my homeland. In my own home, at my own desk in my own room. I do not write in my university office, on the other side of the city. In Ballycastle at our seaside cottage, I write best looking at the sunset or dawn, both of which are very extraordinary in summer. I am very privileged to have that, but in winter it is darkness and electric light. A few poems I wrote by candlelight, because we have no electricity in the cottage, I think flickered a bit!

CV2: Is there a particular quality that would identify your poetry as being from northern Ireland?

MM: I would say much of the contempt and resentment and what some would call intolerance of my work locates it in this particularly savage culture. I think it has the duality of here, the slipping cloaks of Irish/English, British/Europeans, and an isolated anxiety at being an island within an island beyond an island.