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Reading The Future Michael Longley
 
 
Irish Writers in Conversation With Mike Murphy
 
 


MM: You've said, "If prose is a river, poetry is a fountain" and "The gap between good poetry and good prose is quite narrow." Would you elaborate briefly on poetry vis-á-vis prose?

ML: What good prose and good poetry have in common is rhythm, and beyond that I think that the form of a poem is like the nozzle through which water is forced to make a fountain. The result is free-flowing and at the same time shapely. Beyond that what makes a poem is something quite mysterious. The writing of a poem is akin to what I imagine a religious experience might be. Poetry is the way I make sense of the world. It's an exploration. When I'm writing a poem I don't know exactly what I'm saying. I'm writing it in order to find out what I'm saying. It's also a sensuous experience. I say the words aloud as I'm working with them. I roll them round in my mouth. When it's going well I feel like a blacksmith hammering molten iron, it's so sensuous. It's an erotic experience and I never know where it's going to take me. I don't know what shape the poem is going to be. I don't decide anything in advance. It's the most exciting thing in the world for me. In terms of pleasure it's more enjoyable than eating or drinking or sex even. I live hoping that there'll be another poem.

MM: How do you know when the poem is finished?

ML: That's a mysterious thing too. It's intuitive. There's a sense of the poem having created its own critical gravity or whatever the term inphysics is. How does a painter know not another brushstroke more? A lot of poems are spoilt because the poet doesn't know when to stop. For me, the strange thing is getting out three or four words or half a line and sensing even at that moment that this poem is going to be a little fragment of four short lines or a sonnet or six quatrains. In my bones I know it's finished because the shape the poem has itself made tells me. I might return afterwards but it would only be tinkering, changing "and" to "but", or "a" to "the".

MM: You're fortunate, too, in having a resident critic of the standard of your wife Edna.

ML: Yes, that keeps me on my toes. She is one of the best readers of poetry in Ireland, in Europe probably. She's much more intelligent than I am. If I had advice to give to a young poet, I would say marry someone much more intelligent than yourself, which is what I did. Certainly when I finish a poem, with trepidation I show it to the Missus, and if she gives it the "good housekeeping seal of approval" I don't really care too much what anyone else thinks. There are one or two friends afterwards I'd show it to, perhaps. It used to be Derek Mahon and Seamus Heaney.


Biographical Notes - Michael Longley
1939: Born in Belfast to English parents. Educated at Royal Belfast Academical Institution.

1958: Attends Trinity College, Dublin. Later in Belfast becomes a member of Philip Hobsbaum's Group.

1967: Ten Poems (Belfast: Festival Publications).

1968: Three Regional Voices: Iain Crichton Smith, Barry Tebb, Michael Longley (London: Poet & Printer).

1969: No Continuing City (London: Macmillan).

1970: Joins Northern Ireland Arts Council as Director of Combined Arts.

1971: Under the Moon: Over the Stars (Belfast: Arts Council of Northern Ireland, 1971); edits Causeway: the Arts in Ulster (Belfast: Arts Council of Northern Ireland/Dublin: Gill and Macmillan).

1972: Lares: Poems, illustrated by Brian Ferran (Woodford Green: Poet & Printer).

1973: An Exploded View (London: Gollancz).

1975: Fishing in the Sky: Love Poems (Pinner: Poet & Printer).

1976: Man Lying on a Wall (London: Gollancz).

1979: The Echo Gate (London: Secker & Warburg).

1981: Selected Poems 1963-1980 (Winston-Salem, N.C.: Wake Forest University Press). Patchwork, with drawings by Jim Allen (Dublin: Gallery Press).

1985: Poems 1963-1983 (Dublin: Gallery Press).

1990: Edits Selected Poems of Louis MacNeice (Winston-Salem, N.C.: Wake Forest University Press).

1991: Gorse Fires (London: Secker & Warburg) wins Whitbread Prize for Poetry. Becomes member of Aosdána

1995: The Ghost Orchid (London: Cape Poetry) short-listed for T.S. Eliot Award and chosen as Notable Book of the Year by New York Times Book Review.

1993: Baucis & Philemon, after Ovid, with drawings by James Allen (Hatch End: Poet & Printer). Writer-in-residence at Trinity College, Dublin.

1994: Tuppenny Stung, autobiographical chapters (Belfast: Lagan Press).

1996: Felim Egan: Playthings for the Soul (Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art).

1998: Broken Dishes (Belfast: Abbey Press).

1999: Selected Poems (London: Jonathan Cape).

2000: The Weather in Japan (London: Jonathan Cape) wins Hawthornden Prize for Poetry.

John Banville   Seamus Heaney   Thomas Kinsella
     
Michael Longley   John McGahern   Tom Murphy
     
 Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill   William Trevor   Edna O'Brien
     
Marina Carr   Brian Friel   Derek Mahon


© RTÉ 2001