WHERE WATER COMES TOGETHER
WITH OTHER WATER
Loving them all the way back to the source
Loving everything that increases me.
RAYMOND CARVER
There is something unexplainable about
the cycle of the tides, As long as I can remember
I had a strange unfearful love of water.
Maybe it started when I was very young seeing
my reflection in a puddle on the dark sidewalks
or maybe it was in the womb before I was born like
me becoming a poet it’s unexplainable.
I think my poetic mind was being formed when I was
very young, Poetry washes over me like the horrific but very
beautiful incident that happened to me when I was a young
boy holidaying in Cushendall. I ran towards my brother
on the shoreline and tripped on a clump of moss by a little
boat port and went cascading into the sea. I don’t know
how long I was in there but it was beautiful, dancing in
the womb of aquamarine. The colours were amazing like
Being caught within a rainbow. An American tourist dived
in and hauled me out pumped the brine from my lungs
and gave me the kiss of life.
Patrick Kavanagh and Raymond Carver are so far apart
in space and time one from Inneskeen co, louth, Ireland
during the forties to the sixties and one from the sixties
to eighties from Yakima, Washington state. I would like
to tell you about how they cascaded on my shore.
When I read Raymond Carver for the first time
it stopped my breath I had to tear myself away
from the poem to gasp for air. A poem and had
never done, it gave me a physical presence.
that to me before or since, although he’s from
the mid-west of America he spoke my language
the only other poet who came from my world
Was Patrick Kavanagh, as a boy I lived a mile
from mucker, I felt them both deep inside I love
their filthy realism, they say it how it is. They
held me up on the tight-rope of literature
and helped me say, I can do this. I come from
an unpoetic world of republicanism but Carver
and Kavanagh put a pen in my hand not a gun
and filled it full of ink.
Kavanagh showed me his ditches around hack-
ballscross the trees and the green, green grass
Cool around my ankles. I called it my freedom winds.
It made me see that not all the world Was at war,
it took away my Belfast bitterness and hatred
and put peace in my heart.
In this essay I hope to link the streams of poetry from
The grand canal in Dublin to the streams
where water-
Comes together with other water at Yakima, Washington
state, Carver and Kavanagh country, The source
The reservoir of poetry. Raymond Carvers
last book
Of poems opens with a poem by the polish
poet
Czeslaw Milosz called gift:
Gift
A day so happy, Fog lifted early I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There
was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no man worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man didn’t
embarrass me. In my body I felt no pain.
On straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.
It is this poem that captures the essence of a new
path to the waterfall and the canal bank poems
in nineteen fifty nine Kavanagh underwent Surgery
for lung cancer, the most shocking traumatic event
to occur in his life-time.
His diseased lung was removed, his recovery was spent
in Dublin’s Hibernian hotel and with his sister in Long-
ford, returning to Dublin to convalesce on the banks
of the grand canal between Bagot street and Leeson Street,
the poet was content to surrender himself to the pleasure
of looking and listening to the people of the city
and the soft flow of the river as he reclined on
its grassy banks,
This was the place of his rebirth, free from
the burdened strife of his past. Hold it, hold it
by its slippery tail. This moment as you lay
Although you have twangs of pain you are not
unhappy and are entitled to thank god that the grass
you lie on is exactly the same grass that meant?
In September nineteen eighty seven Raymond Carver
was diagnosed with lung cancer after splitting up
that reoccurred as a brain tumor in March.
After refusing recommendations from doctors to undergo
brain surgery and went through seven weeks of intensive
brain radiation. After a short respite, however tumors
were found on his lungs in early June.
Even his cigarette packaging bore the imprint he placed
there in large black letters ‘NOW’, his way of paying
homage to the moment. The poem where water comes
together with other water reminds me so much
of Kavanaghs moment on the Grand Canal:
I love the music they make and rills in glades
Can anything be more wonderful than a spring?
Both Kavanagh and carver knew the poverty
of the working class, Kavanagh said poverty
is good for the soul. Both men knew that such
striving for life was not a romantic journey,
Kavanaghs great hunger
Shows his brutal honesty of Patrick Maguire
as an overworked slave. Raymond Carver
shows his terrible beauty in ‘What the doctor said’,
his mentor Anton Chekhov, the Russian writer
explained it in a short
Story as, the prosaic struggle for existence which
takes away the joy of life.
That line weaves through the great hunger
and the pathetic life of Patrick Maguire
and Kavanaghs dark documentary style
showed its tragic reality, Kavanagh himself
said it lacked the nobility of poetry but
I think it had to show its filthy realism.
They both received a basic education, as Kavanagh
said, I grabbed an education late but barely. Carver
while in his spare space time he studied at various
Creative writing courses. Carver experienced
the fractured spirit caused by poverty and too little
the pain with alcohol. Chekhov also wrote,
peasant blood flows with the veins and you cannot
astound me with the virtues of the peasantry, a line
carver quoted often to naïve students or reporters
who attempted to make him a spokesman
for the glories of the working class experience.
He never forgot those menial jobs and he felt
strongly for those who didn’t a way out of such
a life in his short stories he shows that such a life
were not without consequence. That their suffering
was real and Not to be swept into the gutters disregarded.
For both rivers were a spiritual source of
poetic inspiration. Kavanagh says in a piece called self-portrait,
Initially a television script and says, there are two kinds
of simplicity, the simplicity of going away and the simplicity
of return, the last is the ultimate sophistication. In the final
simplicity we don’t care whether w appear foolish or not.
We talk of things that earlier would embarrass us.
We are satisfied with being ourselves, however small.
So it was that on the banks of the Grand Canal between
Bagot Street Bridge and Leeson Street bridge in the warm
summer of nineteen fifty five, I lay and watched the green
waters of the canal. I had just got out of hospital, I wrote:
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