Some nterviews with Derek
Mahon
Willie Kelly, Each Poem for me is a New Beginning [interview], in Cork Review, 2 (1981), pp.10-12, p.11 |
I dont think I have growth.
I know modern poets are supposed to develop, show signs of technical novelity.
although Ive made deliberate efforts - perhaps too deliberate -
to write a different kind of poety (not all of which have seen the light
of day) I think Im basically the kind of poet who doesn develo,
who doesnt change, who just writes in the same voice, with slight
modifications and accretions of new tones of voice and new material. (p.11.)
Further, I think theres
a sense in which the human race flatters itself, takes too much for granted
its own status as the articulate centre of the universe. But I dont
think the inanimate world has had its due. Yet of course the human race
is the articulate centre of the universe as far as we know. Im speaking
frankly as an atheist. I dont [...] I don t, as they say, believe
in God. But I think ther is .. I think .. Im using very big names
here but I think I share with Yeats ... You know where he said in his
Autobiographies that he had a religious nature, but the he was deprived
of belief by his fathers scepticism, and so he turned to the occult.
I dont think I have a religious nature in that sense but I have
a consciousness of things over and above, beside and below human life.
I am deprived of belief in God, if deprivation it is, by my own rationalistic
habits of mind, my own education, and yet there is [...] I make room for
the numinous, for the unexplained. (p.11.)
[...] Heaney is very sure sense
of what hes about. I havent that certainty. Each poem for
me is a new beginning. With Seamus each poem is an accretion, an addition,
a further step along a known road. [... H]e is performing a task the dimensions
of which seem to be fairly clear. He knows what he is about is the best
way I can put it. I only know what Im about when Ive done
it. (p.12)
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James A.
Murphy [with] Lucy McDiarmid & Michael J. Durkan, Q & A with
Derek Mahon, in Irish Literary Supplement, 10:2 (Fall 1991),
pp.27-28. |
Politically Northern Ireland shouldnt exist,of course.
Ive been a United Irishman since I was about fourteen.; I
suppose home for me would be a little place in County Antrim called Cushendun,
where both my children were baptised. it sounds sentimental, but the Glens
of Antrim are a little bit of real Ireland.
I
would like to take this opportunity to correct a few misconceptions. First
of all, I am not sophisticated, I am not cosmopolitan, I was not a member
of Philip Hobsbaums fucking Belfast Group. I was in a different
city. I was a member of my own group in Dublin. I went once to
Philips group, and never again.
[On changing
the word cunt to twit in Afterlives]: I
discussed it with friends and it became apparent that it was an unacceptable
use of the word, and to perpetuate that use of the word would be invidious.
It wasnt a marketing decision, God forbid, merely good manners,
if good manners have any place in literature.
I think
Ive come to the end of structured forms. One of my latest, The
Yaddo Letter, is very very and loose. Quotes Shelley: the
great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers
to the effect by acting upon the cause. Also quotes Francis Stuart, High Consistory: The artist at his most ambitious does not
seek to change maps but, minutely and over generations, the expression
on some of the faces of men and women.
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William
Scammell, interview with Derek Mahon, in Poetry Review [Special
Irish Issue], 81, 2 (Summer 1991), pp.4-6. |
I would say I dislike
the term Northern Irish poetry, though I know what you mean
by the phenomenon, of course. Northern Irish poetry
is a regional variety of Irish poetry, not of British poetry,
horrible term. Heaney quite right, objected to British in
the Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry; he though they
were going to use a different title. As regards the phenomenon,
I am too close to it to see the woods for the trees, but it doesnt
seem all that phenomenal to me, more in the nature of things. Why shouldnt
so-called Northern Irish poets write so well?
I am not any kind of mystic,
though I can think of worse things to be [...] but I do believe poetry
and religion are related, at least in origin, as are theatre and
dance. When Plato banished the poets what he was banishing was the subversive
Dionysian spirit, which is lyrical and unamenable to rational explanation
and control.
Ah, the Shed. That
had its sources in Troubles, whence the dedication. [...]. A lot of people
seem to like it, though the TLS turned it down at the time: imagine! The
troubles with a performance like that is that you cant do it again,
though A Garage in Co. Cork earned the accolade of a mention
in Pseuds Corner [. I dont know what to say about the Shed
except that details are often misunderstood. The Indian compounds are
Indian as in Raj, not as in Peru. It has been suggested to me that mushrooms
dont really behave like that; but I am assured that certain varieties
do. Anyhow, these do.
Courtyards in Delft: The
poem was only four stanzas originally, ending with gorse,
the protestant words for whins. (The poem is about Protestantism.)
Then I tried to be too explicit with a fifth stanza and succeeded only
in being inept so Ive now reverted to the original version, which
I hop is arginally more ept. De Hoochs [sic] contemporaries founded
Cape Colony and took the Williamite Wars to Ireland; hence veldt and gorse. [itals. added]
In fact, for reasons I am not
disclosing, my best work has yet to see the light of day. The new Selected
Poems [1991] is a tombstone - a handsome tombstone but a tombstone
none the less.
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