John W. Evans: “I wrote the poems in The Fight Journal to make sense of an experience about which I felt strongly biased: my divorce. I wanted to recognize the humanity of all involved on the page because this was something I struggled to do in real life. I hoped to find closure, healing, and an answer to two questions. Why had my marriage failed? How had I been complicit in that failure? Adrienne Rich’s ‘From An Old House in America’ was the formal model for the long title poem. Marta Tikkanen’s ‘The Love Story of the Century’ was a precedent for writing about these dynamics. Both poems are personal favorites.” (web)
Jim Feeney: “I was born in Dublin and grew up there. Dublin is a city with a long literary history but I think perhaps it’s that Dubliners need to make a remark that most informs my poetry, that need to get people’s attention to make them laugh. Which is not to say that my poems are jokes or are necessarily funny but making a remark or joke involves a compression of language and an ability to analyse a situation that is also essential in writing poetry. Of course, I don’t always succeed.” (web)
Annie Grimes: “I wrote this poem after seeing a bunch of TikToks showcasing Caitlin Clark’s standout performance in the NCAA tournament. Although I rarely watch sports—men’s or women’s—I know better than to peruse the comments of any social media post highlighting the accomplishments of female athletes. Despite this, I always click on the comments, and I always feel worse afterward. For some reason this feeling felt best conveyed in the context of a conversation I overheard at a local coffee shop a few months ago, the specifics of which I have been unable to shake since.” (web)
“Oíche na Gaoithe Móire” by Frank DullaghanPosted by Rattle
Frank Dullaghan
OÍCHE NA GAOITHE MÓIRE
“The Night of the Big Wind”—On the night of 6th January 1839, the worst storm ever reported hit the west coast of Ireland. With winds of up to 130 mph it devastated the country, claiming up to 800 lives, according to some reports.
How could one account for it, coming as it did
during the hours of darkness, building itself up
in the black of night? Rain-sodden, it lashed
the thatched roofs of cabins until they collapsed,
ripped spires off churches, tumbled walls.
Cattle froze to death where they stood. Sheep
were bowled off the sides of mountains.
It roared in from the open Atlantic and travelled
eastwards, ripped through Dublin, blew boats
from Skerries across the Irish Sea. The like
had never been seen. It was the start, the
Seanachaí storytellers said later, shaking their heads.
It was the great leaving. The Sidhe, the Irish fairies,
who lacking wings, travelled on the back of winds
they raised, had left Ireland in mighty numbers.
For sure, there were not many of them left when
that night was over—hay ricks scattered, Hawthorn
and Rowan whipped to shreds, and the music and
lights that were sometimes witnessed around
fairy forts, no longer seen. It was a catastrophe.
Less than a decade later, a blight would come
on the potato crop, and famine would send
families into the west in coffin ships, crossing
the same ocean that had held that Gaoithe Móire
in its maw, continuing the Sidhe’s great leaving.
The land lifted from the water, the Seanachaí said,
Frank Dullaghan: “The big thing I learned from Kavanagh was the power of an image. I remember his famous poem ‘In Memory of My Mother.’ His mother’s buried in a churchyard in Monaghan, but he sees her on a market day walking through the town, and he remembers her as they’re stacking up the ‘ricks of hay against the moonlight.’ I remember that image, and I could see it when I first read it; it was like a lightning bolt. I don’t know why certain images hit us, but that image—I could see it. There was no great thing happening here; it was just those simple words, and yet they had the power to create this picture in my head. I remember thinking, ‘I need to be able to do that, get these images, find simple words to capture something and put it down.’” (web)
Abby E. Murray: “I wrote this while sitting outside my daughter’s school, waiting to pick her up from engineering club where they learn to make balloon-powered cars and popsicle-stick catapults in a world armed with steel and fire. All the children killed at a school in Tennessee this week were the same age as her. That morning, the Washington Post offered in-depth coverage of ‘The Blast Effect,’ or what happens inside a child’s body when an AR-15 round pierces it, because it is considered ‘critical to public knowledge,’ and I suppose they’re right. We, as a public, are being ignored by government officials who do not care how many times a day we’re forced to imagine our own children dying, or worse, experience it. We are being shown how to picture it more vividly, how to maintain ourselves as part of the problem. My own hope can sometimes feel small as a dry kernel; my daughter’s hope, which is expansive and certain, is what might save it.” (web)
Martina Dalton: “I write poetry as a way of re-remembering. I am inspired by the landscape where I live, in a seaside town. I walk daily among birds and sand and sea, all of it changing. Sea always leaving, always bringing something to my feet. Writing poems feels like that.” (web)