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Editor’s Note: The arts are a significant thread in the fabric of Rockland County. They inspire, enrich, and chronicle our lives. They also play a role in our economic well-being; theater, writing, dance, crafts draw us to spaces. They invite strangers to share in our bounty. They are an indelible contribution. Welcome again, Christine Potter, a poet, to RCBJ.
Maureen Henry: Irish Wisdom, Human Intelligence
By Christine Potter
Sometimes I worry about AI slop taking over everything.
Besides writing this column, I edit the poetry section of Eclectica, an online literary magazine celebrating its thirtieth anniversary this new year. So yes, I’ve read submissions that sound…well, shall we say a bit robotic? Too predictably sentimental, too smooth, too meh. The poetry world is a strange place, but I have yet to understand why someone would use AI to write a poem and then send the thing to literary presses. It’s not like poets make much money. Money is nice, but that’s not what poetry is for. When you are absorbed in writing a poem, you are busy learning something important about yourself and the world. Using AI to write poems is like ordering a great meal and then hiring someone else to eat it for you.
Sparkill’s Maureen Henry writes with one hundred percent HUMAN intelligence. She says she came to poetry as a grownup, during a time in her life when she “was carrying more emotion than I knew how to manage.” So she joined John Aiello’s Writing From Life workshop at the Pearl River Library, and in her words, writing poems there helped me make sense of what felt overwhelming.”
Of course it did. That’s what poetry does best! One of my favorite lines in all of literature is from Mark Twain, speaking in the voice of Huckleberry Finn: “you can’t pray a lie.” You can’t lie in poetry, either; the poem will tell on you. Always!
In my own practice, I end up writing what’s in my heart, whether I want to examine it or not: the poem just goes there. Maureen Henry’s poems often stem from her Irish heritage. Here’s wisdom from her about the Irish way of expressing sorrow and joy, saying that they are “on you:” something outside of you, a comforting and smart way of to think about it.
Emotionally Irish
I am sad.
A feeling I’ve named.
The Irish would not express it so.
Sadness is not the self.
Sadness is simply on you.
A cloak across shoulders,
heavy as wet wool,
scratching the skin.
You wear it for a time,
and it wears on you.
But it is not you.
Its hold will loosen,
lift, and go.
Joy comes differently.
It is on you,
like glitter,
petals scattered on the wind,
dew glistening on heather.
Radiating from within.
For a time, those you touch
walk away shimmering.
Though you wear it well,
you are not joy.
In Irish, feelings rest on you.
They land like weather,
they shift like tide.
They come and go.
Stir, settle, slip away,
leaving the soul unscathed.
Emotions pass through us,
borrowed and brief.
Some we fold away
to be worn again
when the time comes.
Do not mistake the cloak for the soul.
When sadness grows heavy,
loosen the clasp.
Let it slide from your shoulders.
When joy comes calling,
open the door wide.
Invite the lads round for a jar.
Joy, like glitter,
sparkles from one to another,
rippling outward.
So go on now.
Walk into the world with ease.
You’ll be grand.
There’s a whole lot to like here! Maureen was a rhetoric major, and there is a strong rhetorical “spine” in this poem based on that Irish notion of emotion living outside of the soul. I love the rough, sodden cloak of sorrow, heavy as wet wool. But I might love the concept of joy as glitter even more.
Here’s why: once, years ago, my husband swiped one of my bath bombs. He used it before he went to a weekly staff meeting at the church where he worked as Minister of Music, somehow remaining unaware that the little green ball he’d chosen was loaded with glitter. I’d been saving it for New Year’s Eve. He just wanted some nice magnesium salts, but what he got was glitter everywhere: on his neck, in his mustache, in his hair. And of course he didn’t notice and of course he sat with his colleagues looking like he’d been up all night at a rave. I noticed his sparkle when I came home from teaching. Because Ken is who he is, he finally looked in the mirror then. He just laughed.
Joy is like that. Glitter makes you laugh because it gets everywhere and is a communal experience. So Maureen Henry’s metaphor is kind of brilliant—or shiny and contagious. It’s to think about it!
Also: if joy is communal, sorrow is lonely: it’s your cloak. But you can take it off. There’s the wisdom. I love, also, that this poem ends on the word “grand,” used in the Irish way. I’ve always loved hearing it like that when I’ve been in Ireland —or Pearl River, where Henry was raised.
Maureen says she enjoys revision, especially changing a poem by changing its narrator. That’s a really useful way to rewrite something, and I forget about it too often. Persona poems are surprisingly freeing, because imaging the “I” as someone other than yourself gives you liberty to be truly honest. Funny how well that works. Here’s a poem I was lucky enough to hear Maureen blow the room away with at a reading. Here again, she draws on her Irish roots:
Yer Man
Ah, look, it’s yourself.
C’mere, you’ll want to hear this.
You know yer man? The one
with a head on him like a boiled turnip.
Long in the tooth,
and an eejit besides.
He’s the seventh son of a seventh son.
Always hanging about on a
Monday, Thursday, Monday,
never a useful day.
He couldn’t cure a thirst
with a pint in his hand.
Go on, you know him.
The oul fella from the pub,
thick as porridge and full of blather.
He’s a craic vacuum,
sucks the fun from every room.
Ach.
A pure gobshite, he is.
Now, you must know him.
You must.
Anyway,
his neighbor’s granny died, so.
God bless her.
And him!
He asks if there’d be tae
after the service.
Has enough cheek
for a second arse,
that one.
Look, you’ll see him soon enough.
He’ll be stuffing scones in his pockets.
Don’t be making eye contact
or you’ll get stuck
buyin’ him a jar.
Listen, even the Lord Himself
slips out the back
when yer man walks in.
You mind yourself now,
Love.
You’ve been warned.
This poem is fun to read silently because you can so clearly hear the dialect in your head. It’s even better aloud. The gent under discussion, with his thirst for beer that other folks buy for him and his pockets full of scones he pilfered from the reception after a funeral is evoked in full, living color! But what I like even better is the attitude of the narrator, who seems to be richly enjoying bad-mouthing him to someone who apparently doesn’t know him well and needs to be warned. So is the person speaking the poem looking out for whoever she’s talking to—or does she just enjoy her own zingers about someone with a head “like a boiled turnip” and “enough cheek for a second arse?”
I’ve always thought one of the hardest things to do in poetry is to be funny in free verse. It’s much easier in rhymed, metrical verse—perhaps because of the tension between something that sounds formal and high-toned and a silly subject. But this free verse poem makes me laugh aloud—for real. Maureen says that because her grandparents were born in Ireland and most of her friends are Irish, her language has “carried an accent even even when my voice didn’t. My tendency to talk around a point, my humor, and my storytelling instincts all come from that tradition. Irish humor is often deadpan, irreverent, self-deprecating, and teetering on the edge of tragedy. It doesn’t feel like I’m inventing these poems.”
They don’t feel invented as I read them, either. They ring true.
I admire especially the middle stanzas of this next poem she wrote, which happens to be about the holiness of humor.
Punchline as prayer
A pun can save the soul.
A chuckle stitches the seams of sorrow.
And so we keep laughing,
not because nothing matters,
but because everything does.
And humor,
with its raucous joy,
absurd and defiant.
Irrepressible.
This is how we feel the pulse of life.
This reminds me of something Stephen Colbert once said about being a comedian in these times of fear and upheaval: “Do you know what I like about comedy? You can’t laugh and be afraid at the same time—of anything. If you’re laughing, I defy you to be afraid.” Maureen Henry is making a similar and similarly important point here: “And so we keep laughing/ not because nothing matters,/ but because everything does.” Nihilism is for losers! Everything does matter! Those are excellent thoughts to take into a new year, I think.
Here’s a poem I wrote after a bad news day, when I took refuge in TCM for a good old 1930’s musical fix. Seems a decent one for the next twelve months, in which (dare we say it?) I have high hopes that things will get better!
See you in February. I have a reading and open mic at Big Red Books on February 18th, by the way, and my new full-length poetry collection, Why I Don’t Take Xanax, might even be out by then!
When All This Nonsense Is Over
When all this nonsense is over, I want my life to
be a movie I could easily fall asleep watching—
and wake up on the couch mildly annoyed, but
grateful that the time in which I’m writing this is
done. Today feels like driving past a new SUV
slid off the road at a dizzy angle, its passengers
outside, staring blankly into traffic. Nobody’s hurt,
my husband says, but we don’t know that. And in
the sky, the lovely sun-bleached blue sky, two con
trails brilliantly cross. What does any of it mean?
I want my life to be a black and white musical, a
song I thought cheesy in high school now making
me weep. We both fell asleep, my husband says.
You can watch the end tomorrow. But I never do.
Maybe I’d rather see the place things really start to
change. Maybe that’s what’s happening even now.
