Paul Maddern was born in in Bermuda in 1962. He has four publications with Templar Poetry: Kelpdings (2009), The Beachcomber’s Report (2010), Pilgrimage (2017) and The Tipping Line (2018). Pilgrimage and The Beachcomber’s Report both won a Bermuda Government Literary Award, with the latter shortlisted for the Eithne Strong Award for Best First Collection. His poem, ‘Effacé’, is on the GCSE syllabus. He has a BA in Film (Queen’s University, Canada), a Creative Writing MA in Poetry (Seamus Heaney Centre, QUB), and a PhD (School of English, QUB). He is the owner of The River Mill, a reading and writing retreat in South Down, and has taught at the University of Leeds and the Seamus Heaney Centre. 

Moyra Donaldson: Hi Paul – lovely to chat with you. First of all, can I ask how did you get into poetry?

Paul Maddern: And first, can I say thank you for asking me to be your interviewee and congratulations on the new collection (Carnivorous, Doire Press).

I only started writing poetry when I moved to Ireland in 2000, from London. I’d been there twelve years and needed to rethink where my life was heading and to change addictive behaviours. I’d always been an avid reader but I started writing god-awful poems as a form of self-help. At least I recognised that they were awful. Then, when I started to move beyond woe-is-me tripe, a few people suggested there might be something worthwhile in the work. The best advice I received was to stop writing for a bit and to read a great deal of poetry, and to read both broadly and deeply. What this wise soul meant was that I should read both a great deal of the canon and contemporary writers and then, when I found someone that I especially admired, I should devour them; learn exactly what it was – in terms of both from and content – that had made me engage with those particular poems.

One of the poets I devoured was Yeats and I continue to admire the work tremendously, despite a suspicion that I wouldn’t have enjoyed his company for long. Too often these days we insist the poetry and personal history of the writer be weighted equally. We seem to value only those writers who appear, at least outwardly, to be purer than pure and perfectly PC. But who wants poetry written by saints? Most great writers fail miserably as human beings. I prefer poetry written by sinners and Yeats was a tremendous sinner.

But I digress….  So, after the reading hiatus, I started writing again and when I told a friend I might go back to university, she suggested I apply to the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s for their MA in Creative Writing. I didn’t know of the place but went to a few readings they hosted, liked what I heard, and was thrilled to be accepted onto the course. I was fortunate that Sinéad Morrissey and Ciaran Carson were both there at the time. Sinéad facilitated the Queen’s Writers Group and had a terrific ability to pinpoint where a poem is and isn’t working, and to articulate why that is the case. Plus, during Sinéad’s tenure as facilitator, Serendipity brought together an exciting rag-bag of emerging and established writers: Jean Bleakney, Paula Cunningham, Miriam Gamble, Eoghan Walls, Jo Baker, Caoilinn Hughes, Alex Wylie, Maureen Boyle, Olive Broderick, Matt Kirkham … to name a few. And there’s no doubt that being surrounded by these talents made me raise my game.

Ciaran’s was a drip-drip influence but no less important. His attention to the minutiae of a poem, his passion for etymology, his uncompromising artistic integrity, and of course his dress sense, have had an immense impact. I think of Ciaran every time I write a poem. When I consider it is finished, I conjure his spirit and then rethink that decision.

MD: Your new book, The Tipping Line, is a tour de force of narrative and lyric and diary entries and epistolary verse. Was this the format you had in your mind when you started the work, or did it develop during the writing of it?

PM: Thank you for the kind words, Moyra. But no, I had no set plan when I started ‘the thing’. I say ‘thing’ because I’m not entirely sure what The Tipping Line really is. I set out to write a short poem for my best friend’s son, Rowan Vickers, who was off to study drama at Juilliard. I thought the poem would be a little lyric employing some metaphor to do with “Life’s Great Journey.”  Well, it’s still about that journey, but spread across seventy-plus pages.

When I started it, I was staying in the poet Jean Bleakney’s caravan in a remote part of Donegal. Quite quickly though, I realised I wanted to do something a little different with ‘Donegal’. I’d started writing all the clichés about that oft-Romanticised landscape and was wary of going down that route.  I should explain….

I’ve bored people to tears about my admiration for Conor O’Callaghan’s poetry. Along with Sinéad and Ciaran, he’s been an immense influence. His second collection in particular (Seatown: Gallery Press) asks questions about the Irish Lyric tradition and how a new generation of writers might engage with it. How do we avoid writing the same old same old? And I’ve also started boring even more people with a theory about Donegal as a totemic marker for change in Irish poetry. Mahon’s ‘Daytrip to Donegal’ offers it up as a nightmare landscape that is inescapable: “the slow sea washed against my head. / Performing its immeasurable erosions – / Spilling into the skull […]” As a poet, how do you deal with ‘Donegal’ and the weight of literary tradition? O’Callaghan is a devotee of Mahon’s and in his poem ‘East’, he outright rejects the west coast and all the Oirishness that goes with it. Then Leontia Flynn writes a little poem, ‘Donegal’, that if you didn’t have the title you’d be hard pressed to know had anything to with the county. I think this is a deliberate decision on Leontia’s part; to distance her poetry from Romanticized clichés. And recently, the young poet Mícheál McCann has written a fantastic poem set in Donegal, which involves Grinder, gay sex, and a rather wonderful and unexpected pastoral epiphany. Iconic Donegal re-imagined for an Ireland that now supports SSM.

At the same time as I’m thinking about Donegal as a concept, I’m aware that the students at the Heaney Centre (and elsewhere, of course) are thinking about the lyric tradition, and reading the likes of Claudia Rankine and Vahni Capildeo, and considering what ‘a poem’ might achieve outside of accepted lyric norms. And I like that. I like writers who engage with and challenge tradition and think about where form might be heading. By that, I mean an intellectual and hard-fought engagement with the art form; a questioning of yourself as an artist. 

So, that’s a long way around to saying that I was thinking about how I might respond to the west coast. I did include the picturesque elements of the Loughros Estuary but I also introduced Rowan’s grandfather, the great Canadian heldentenor Jon Vickers, who enters the amphitheatre of the landscape to perform his famous roles. I segue from that to watching a film in Jean’s caravan, Gods and Monsters, about the last days of the British and openly gay film director, James Whale, who gave us Frankenstein, Journey’s End, Show Boat, The Bride of Frankenstein and The Invisible Man. The section ends with me back on the Donegal beach, calling for lightning – the element that gave Frankenstein’s Creature life.

And when it began to dawn on me that this could be a long poem, I began to consider how form might function within a collection-length piece of work, as opposed to a series of short lyric poems. That’s when I decided to adopt an epistolary form throughout and address it all to Rowan. Then, as a result of serendipitous connections springing from Whale and Frankenstein, I introduced the found poems based on the writings of the British artist Paul Nash, quoted texts within the body of the poem, included results of research into WWI, and all the while tried to include a biographical element in order to draw the reader along with me. As I refined the piece, I tried to get large sections of the poems into blank verse (although certain lines might only fit my peculiar 5-beat readings) and to have formal echoes throughout (the fractured lines, the use of couplets, and so on). So, although it might be divided into eight sections, I hope there is a formal and thematic continuity that unites the whole thing. And I hope the result is a marriage between both the Irish lyric form and something a little different.

MD: I have a similar question about the themes. Frankenstein’s monster, World War One and the autobiographical elements, they all plait beautifully through each other. Were all three there from the beginning?

PM: Perhaps The Tipping Line eventually became the Creature – an assembly of different parts assembled to make one entity – but the idea for this plaiting wasn’t there from the start. It grew during the period of composition, both by accident and by design. In addition to unifying elements I’ve already suggested, there are recurring phrases that crop up throughout – the old Homeric trick to aid performance of a long piece. Lists of names and objects appear in each section and there many references to staged events: films, plays, operas, ballets, and exhibitions. There’s the recurring “amphitheatre” of the Donegal landscape, visited three times, and of course the figures who pop up throughout: Rowan, his grandfather Jon Vickers, Whale, Nash, J W Staddon (a soldier), the Creature, Sherriff, and my life-long friend Wendy, who’s my host while in London. The whole thing is sandwiched between the image of Frankenstein’s Creature and it is topped-and-tailed by statistical poems (for want of a better term) that include the death-dates and names of Bermudians who died in WWI. Versions of those poems are found inside the body of the poem as well. And as I said, there are found poems based on writings by Nash, famous for his WWI paintings but whose post war career was perhaps even more important as he founded Unit 1, the first surrealist group in Britain. And I discovered he was extremely fond of using found objects in his art, which tied in neatly with objects ‘tipping up’ in the poem.

If these are simple linking devices, in terms of the broader picture, one of the aims of The Tipping Line is to highlight both the interconnectedness of artistic practice and the lingering impact of historical events—and that those two things are, themselves, not unrelated. For example, the fracturing of the image and the rise of Modernism that occurred after WWI is related, I think, to the horrors of that war. In its immediate aftermath, nothing quaint could be accepted easily unless it was escapist in nature. And it’s no coincidence that ‘the horror movie’ (e.g. Frankenstein, 1931) becomes a popular genre post WWI.

As I got further into WWI research for the poem, I began to think of the Creature as emblematic of the resurrected dead from that war: an assembly of parts from different men. The idea is there, too, in the Whale bio-pic, Gods and Monsters. The more I thought about Frankenstein, the more I realised how important it is to our contemporary psyches. It’s our new Creation Myth in which man supplants God as life-giver. That’s the reason the 1931 film was banned in Northern Ireland, you know. Seriously. Read Martin Mooney’s fantastic poem on the subject. And think about what we’re doing with genes these days, and growing body parts in petri dishes, and cloning animals, and artificial insemination, etc. Artificial Intelligence is also surely about (re)creating automated versions of ourselves. Where will that end? ‘Creature’ is everywhere. A reworking of Frankenstein was even commissioned for the Royal Ballet – another timely co-incidence during the time I was writing the thing.

The WWI research led me to the Liddle Collection at the Brotherton Library at Leeds University, where I was then teaching. Searching for references to Sherriff I came across the file on Lieut. J W Staddon, who served with Sherriff at the end of the war, demobbing soldiers.  The Liddle has thousands of such files documenting men and women’s experiences of the war and Staddon’s contained remarkable items and an extraordinary interview. There was one document that made me weep, which is referenced in the poem, and there’s a sketch of Staddon, done by Sherriff, which is placed deliberately at the physical centre of the collection. As I say in the poem, “I imagine Staddon was a good man.”

There are autobiographical sections throughout, as you say, particularly those set in New York and Bermuda. My father lived in Bermuda and was dying during the course of writing the poem and, quite naturally, that had a big impact on me. His was a good death inasmuch as the end was peaceful but it was my first experience of being present at a death and that brought much into focus—such as the deaths of Bermudians in WWI, which had been of research interest until then but took on a far greater emotional weight after my father died.

The other father figure in the poem is Jon Vickers, who possessed one of the great operatic voices of the last century – on a par with Callas in terms of the impact he had on the art form. I knew him through my friendship with his son Ken, Rowan’s father, and his force of personality and intelligence played a huge part in shaping my ideas about artist practice – particularly artistic integrity. The more I’m involved with literary circles, the more I think integrity is the touchstone for everything we do, or it should be. Sadly, artistic integrity is now eroded to the point where the politics of the literary world has become the focus for many writers. More broadly, our society values (or at least affords attention to) such things as TOWIE over and above people like Vickers or, say, Marianela Nuñez. Perhaps it was ever thus but popular culture has supplanted higher artistic endeavours to the point that their significance in our daily lives is diminished immeasurably. We are not the richer for it.

The great Denis O’Driscoll suggested that poetry offers an antidote to the journalist present, something I agree with completely, and I think we can extend that to ballet, opera, fine art, film and all serious artistic endeavour. It’s not that we should live only in a rarefied atmosphere, but neither should ‘elite’ become a dirty word. ‘Elitist’ is bad; ‘elite’ is not. I want the best surgeon, the best plumber, the best pilot, the best teacher; so why does it seem today that it is a sin to require writers and artists to achieve certain standards?

MD: While recently curating an LGBT version of the Poetry Jukebox, Maria McManus’s wonderful project, you spoke about how you feel that LGBT writers here look outside of Ireland for their inspiration. Would you like to say a little more about that?

PM: First, and crucially, I must stress that LGBTQ+ writers are not looking only for Queer poets as a way into writing. As writers first and foremost we, too, look to Homer, Keats, Yeats, H.D., Heaney, McGuckian, Muldoon, Mahon, Damian Smyth, Sinéad Morrissey, Miriam Gamble, etc. (That’s a weird list!) But until recently pretty much all of the Queer output (bar Wilde) was comprised of writing from other shores: Bishop, Merrill, Gunn, Cavafy, and so on. There’s still no equivalent here; no gay Heaney; no trans Longley. Cherry Smyth, Colette Bryce and others began to emerge on the scene and that was wonderful but there is now, since the collapse of the Catholic Church’s influence and the legalisation of SSM in the South, a greater freedom to express the intimacies of Queer sex/love and Queer culture. And this isn’t confined to Ireland, of course.

But I hesitate to say some sort of new order has been achieved. Just look at Uganda, Trump, Brunei… And for my part, there’s still merit in resisting absorption into the fold. Being Other has its advantages. It provides distance. We have been Other for an awfully long time and offer an alternative to the patriarchal, heterosexual norm. And despite a welcome acceptance of LGBTQ+ lifestyles from certain quarters, I’m not convinced we really are part of the literary fold now. As with BAME writers, I think certain publishers are riding the PC bandwagon and organizations are hosting BAME & Queer events in order to meet diversity funding quotas. While this momentum is welcome, it needs to be sustained across generations.

And while I have the soap-box, I should say that although there’s lots of erect cocks and piss and spittle and vaginas and S&M sex poems are out there at the moment, it’s a mistake to see this particular brand of LGBTQ+ writing as edgy and radical. It’s nothing of the sort when you think back to Gunn, Doty, [straight] Olds, Gregory Woods, et al. And have you read Auden’s pornographic poetry? Phew. It’s quite amusing to see the Contemporary Poetry Police bathe the new generation of LGBTQ+ work in the pure light of PC right-on-ness. Actually, this Other-ness, this look-at-us-ness, has been there all along and that needs to be acknowledged.

But I’m very glad to see a new generation of writers setting their own agendas and there is Irish LGBTQ+ work that excites me tremendously. As I’ve said elsewhere, some of the most exciting work in Ireland today is being written by LGBTQ+ writers: Padraig Regan, Annemarie Ní Churreáin, Anna Loughran, Rosamund Taylor, Sarah Clancy, Erin Halliday, Gail McConnell, Dawn Watson, Toby Buckley, Conor O’Cleary…. The list is a long one and a strong one. Not all of this poetry is about being Queer, of course. And why should it be? We don’t ask straight poets to write only about the experience of being straight. But much of it is politically charged, in the best sense, and celebratory. Surely that’s a good thing.  Personally, I think it’s time to consolidate this work and to produce an anthology that celebrates the significance of the LGBTQ+ culture within contemporary Irish poetry. So, Irish publishers … how about it?

MD:I’m always fascinated as to whether the other jobs poets have had, somehow influence the way they write. I’m thinking of the period of time you spent training as a ballet dancer. Are there skills that transfer? Or knowledge?

PM: I was the young boy who danced secretly in his living room because his father didn’t believe boys should do ballet. Once I escaped that home environment, I half-heartedly tried to be a dancer while at university in Canada and then got as far as being an apprentice with the Colorado Ballet. I continued taking class in San Francisco but it became clear that the dream was never going to be a reality. Without being dramatic, I’m convinced that starting dance too late was at the root of many of my addiction problems.

In terms of what I might take from ballet into poetry…? The need for training, the discipline and daily refinement of the muscles; the need to interpret set forms and make them afresh; the idea of ‘the beautiful line’ as a key component of the art form; the acknowledgment that  technique is ever developing but never enough on its own; and that the art from must move forward while honouring the great dancers who came before. But above all, musicality: great dancers and great poets have an ear for the subtlest rhythms of the music.  I think that’s how the line becomes beautiful.

MD: Just over a year ago you opened The River Mill outside Killough, a luxury writing retreat. It has been getting fantastic reviews from everyone who has stayed there. It provides a nurturing environment and holds a space for other writers. How has it been for you? What is your next project in terms of your writing? Are you working on anything in particular?

PM: Thank you, Moyra. The River Mill is an adventure for me and I still can’t quite believe I’ve done it. I swore that after 25 years in catering I would never (EVER!) return to it – and here I am cooking and cleaning for guests. But I love it. It is immensely rewarding and a great joy to spend time in the company of writers. In a very real sense, this is my realisation of Ciaran Carson’s “small back room” theory, the place where he sees ideas being generated, discussed and developed.

In terms of what comes next? How about an anthology of Irish LGBTQ+ writing? Anyone…?