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
of Patrick Kavanagh. Both men suffered from
cancer,
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
on the Grand Canal bank in hot summer weather:
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?
So much to him years ago.
In September nineteen eighty seven Raymond
Carver
was diagnosed with lung cancer after splitting up
blood. He underwent months struggling with the
cancer
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
And meadows, before they have a chance
To become creeks. I may even love them
Best of all for their secrecy. I almost forgot
To say something of the source!
Can anything be more wonderful than a spring?
But the big streams have my heart too
And the places streams flow into rivers.
The open mouths of rivers where they
Join the sea, the places where water
Comes together with other water.
These places stand out in my mind
Like holy places.
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
Married early and had to work for his family’s
survival,
while in his spare space time he studied at various
Creative writing courses. Carver experienced
the fractured spirit caused by poverty and too little
education which resulted in futile attempts to
kill
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:
Leafy with love and the green waters of the
canal
Pouring redemption for me, that I do the will
of god
Wallow in the habitual, the banal. Grow with
nature
Again as before I grew… and so in this moment
Of great daring I became a poet.
