"Playing With the ghosts of words": an interview with Paula Meehan.(poet)(Entrevista)

Paula Meehan was born in Dublin's inner city in 1955 and was educated at Trinity College, Dublin and at Eastern Washington University. She was brought up in a working-class environment, has been involved in community programmes and has used class and social problems as major themes for her poetry. She has taught creative writing in schools, universities and prisons, has been Writer Fellow of the English Department at Trinity and has received a number of Arts Council bursaries.

Paula Meehan is the author of four volumes of poetry: Return and No Blame (1984), Reading the Sky (1985), both by Beaver Row Press, and The Man who was Marked by Winter (1991) and Pillow Talk (1994), both by Gallery Press. Although known mainly as a poet, Meehan was also involved in street theatre groups during her years at Trinity and her play Cell was performed in September 1999 at the City Arts Centre, Dublin. She has made of Dublin a pervasive setting for her work and much of her poetry focuses on the possibility of cultural decolonisation in Ireland, the victimisation of individuals within families and gender asymmetries in contemporary Irish society. Paula Meehan is one of Ireland's most energetic poetic voices and through her work she has contributed to the inscription of gender, class, race and female sexuality in new definitions of "Irishness". She lives in County Dublin and is currently working on a new collection of poetry that is due to appear in the year 2000. An interview conducted by Ines Praga focusing on related issues appeared in The European English Messenger (1997).

I met Paula Meehan in 1998, when I was working on my PhD on Irish women poets. The interview took place in her former fiat in Dublin, where we were talking for a long time about her poetry and about the situation of Irish women writers. The following conversation is part of a much longer transcript and shows her main areas of interest.

Women very often start writing later than men, partly because of there responsibility in childcare. But it also seems that they are far less confident when it comes to calling themselves poets" or writers, basically because the poetic tradition in Ireland--I suppose we could apply the same argument to other literary traditions--is predominantly male and the canon has been established accordingly. Within this literary milieu was it hard for you to start writing?

Not initially, because when I was a very young writer I was still a child. I had a very isolated relationship with writing, I just got on with it by myself. I don't think the impulse to write was for me wrapped up in any hesitation. There were no issues about my rights to be a writer. But when I began to publish, or started to try to publish, then it all changed and there were issues about the kinds of permissions that were given, l am talking about back in the late seventies and the early eighties. One of my ways of survival then would have been to protect myself and to be quite protective of the work I was doing. I have this belief that you can turn all oppression into something positive if you are strong-minded and, in a way, women have learned to do that to survive. It is either that or internalise it and oppress yourself. So, in compensation to a lack of interest, a lack of permissions, or a lack of opportunity, what happened with me was that I did develop ways of using the isolation and using the lack of permission, in fact, I would think that in itself became a theme I would use in poetry or work with. But as a child, as an unconscious writer, those issues didn't arise. I think poetry' by its nature is not gendered. Certainly, the political climate you write in, the community of writers that you share time and space with, that is all gendered. There have been very difficult struggles in this country for women who also want to write.

One of the problems here--as you have intimated in your question--is that ours has been a very phallocentric tradition. So, women coming into that tradition have not been hospitably received. There has been quite a bit of patronising interest in the work of women without really taking it on and treating it as all equal gift. But at the same time, again, in the hands of women, that in itself becomes part of the fuelling, sometimes angers that drive the poet. You have to look at the fact that all oppression can be used in the poetry itself and can be turned into something else. If you are lucky. There must be people out there who didn't have that facility to turn the weapons against the enemy, if you like. Sometimes I really wonder what happens to those voices that don't survive that. They probably get lost. They get discouraged and they get lost.

You mentioned as well in the question that there have been a number of women--certainly my contemporaries--who emerged much later than they might have if they were male. I think that has to do very often with children. Women are still the predominant givers of childcare and unless that changes you are going to see a continuance of women emerging later. Women now often emerge earlier but they haven't got into their childbearing phase. So, we'll see what that brings, whether they can sustain a writing life and still be the primary care-givers to their children. It would be interesting to see what happens. The younger poets emerging now seem determined to keep writing.

And sometimes women who have children portray their experiences as mothers in their poems, linking together creation and procreation, traditionally separated by, again, a phallocentric tradition. In this way they bring new subjects into the poem and they are criticised for writing the so-called "domestic poem ", as if there was a kind of subject that suited poetry more than others, or as if culture was a male reserve, so to speak ...

They may criticise you or diminish your work for writing what they call "domestic poems" but yet, if you write a public poem, or a poem that is perceived to be public, they freak out. When you decode what they are saying critically, basically what they say is "get back in the kitchen, get back in the bedroom". They'll say things like "oh, well, of course, her real strengths are in the domestic details she can bring to a poem". When you start writing a public poem they get very uncomfortable. I think they are often responding out of deep ignorance to the fact that we live in a century where the personal has become the political and that the great lesson of all the liberation movements of the century has been that what you experience in the home is political, that the real wars and battles take place in kitchens and bedrooms, not necessarily, or not primarily, in the Houses of Parliament.

Was there ever a moment when you decided that writing was what you wanted to do?

There have been a number of moments when I have made particular decisions to do with a writing life above other kinds of lives that may have been open to me. There was a particular moment when I decided to publish. But there was never a moment when I decided just to write. Even as a child I felt that I was a writer. As a young woman it came as something of a shock to me to realise that, actually, I had to sit down and write the bloody stuff. Because I just felt like a writer. The actual amount of hard work involved didn't bear upon me for a long time. But there was a moment when I decided ! would publish and move towards being... I don't like to use the word "professional". I suppose I decided to put it out, to be public about it, as opposed to my poetry being a kind of a secretive or private art. You know, to go and look for an audience, I don't mean actively, but at least to put the work out, so that that work might find an audience. And that was while I was in the Shetland Islands, up in the far north of Scotland. I had been writing and writing very hard that particular summer. Basically, I had done nothing else except going out to collect wood on the beaches for my fire. I had the choice there of following a particular kind of life. And I decided I was going to be a public writer. When there was nothing else really in my life, all the signs seemed to …