Gail McConnell's debut poetry pamphlet is Fourteen (London: Green Bottle Press, 2018). The pamphlet was developed with support from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland under the Support for the Individual Artist Programme. Her second pamphlet, >Fothermather, will be published by Ink Sweat & Tears on 1st Nov 2019. The book explores the interaction of parenthood and queerness and is the result of winning the Ink, Sweat and Tears Pamphlet Competition in 2017. Her long poem, 'Type Face', was published in Blackbox Manifold in December 2016 and concerns her experience of reading a Historical Enquiries Team report about her father's murder. She is currently working on a related poetry book and has received an ACES award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland to support this project (Artist Career Enhancement Scheme). She has published poems in Poetry Review, PN Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Manchester Review, past simple, Eborakon and The Tangerine and have poems forthcoming in Stand. Reviews of her poetry have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, PN Review and Cyphers. For more info see: https://pure.qub.ac.uk/en/persons/gail-mcconnell

Moyra Donaldson: Hi Gail – thank you for agreeing to this interview. I first came across your work when I read your long poem, Type Face, published in Blackbox Manifold 17. I found it moving and powerful and your voice was one that felt important in the world of Northern Irish poetry. Would you like to say a little bit about the genesis and writing of Type Face.

Gail McConnell: Thanks for the invitation to speak with you, Moyra, and for the ways you’re reading my work. I remember you contacted me when you had read ‘Type Face’, and I found your response, then and now, deeply encouraging. I suppose the genesis of the poem could be 6th March 1984, the morning my father was shot and killed outside our home in east Belfast as my mother and I stood to wave him off to work in Long Kesh/ The Maze prison. Or perhaps the genesis is the day I received the Historical Enquiries Team Report into his murder, printed in Comic Sans in a spiral-bound stack of paper. Or perhaps the genesis is a midweek 3am in January 2015, awake in the dark and opening my laptop for something to do. Much of the poem was written in the small hours of the night, though of course I didn’t think I was writing a poem – I was just putting fingers to keys and seeing what happened. The couplets appeared early on and felt almost like a joke. It seemed ludicrous – it was ludicrous – to find a rhyme for the words I found in the report – phrases like ‘laceration of the brain’. And the whole act of rhyming through grief is ludicrous, too. The process absorbs you, hence its appeal – absorbs you and helps you move on, though only as far as the next rhyme. I like the patterns of inevitability and return the couplets set in motion. I had so much data, so much information about the circumstances of my father’s death. But I knew nothing. And the rupture between form and matter – the Comic Sans type face detailing his murder – gave me an ironic entry point into the state-sponsored narrative I had been handed in a manila envelope. I had been writing criticism of Irish poetry. I never set out to write a poem – never mind a long one. As it grew, I found myself haunted by the image of an abandoned warehouse – the HET archive – the size of B & Q, where 3,700 piles of paper (more) were waiting to be made into spiral-bound reports in Comic Sans like the one I had been given. And I was thinking about the politics of commemoration and remembrance in the decade of centenaries. There is mourning in the poem, but it’s not an elegy. In part, it’s a critique of post-Peace Process processes – or their absence – and of redemption narratives, be they religious or political. So often now I think about Lyra McKee and what she drew our attention to: the deaths by suicide since the so-called end of the so-called ‘Troubles’. The poem is asking questions about aftermaths and living – about an ongoingness that can also face matters of the past and the fact of death.

MD: With Co-Investigators Dr Jo Scott (University of the West of Scotland) and Dr Deborah Maxwell (University of York), you were Principal Investigator for 'Listening to Voices: Creative Disruptions with the Hearing Voices Network'. Part of this project investigated and analysed notions of ‘voice’. When your pamphlet Fourteen was published from Green Bottle Press in 2018, Damian Smyth described the poems in it as ‘a completely new register in Irish poetry’. Is this description of your work one that you recognise? Are you conscious of striving for fresh ways of saying things, of having a distinctive voice? I sense in your work, a great belief in the power of language; a power to both connect and disconnect us to ourselves and to others.

GMCC: This is as kind a flow of questions as Damian Smyth’s description. Thank you, Moyra. Where to begin? It’s impossible not to speak of Ciaran Carson in trying to say something about voice and language – Ciaran, who we miss. What Ciaran taught so many of us was to be humble before language. It’s a lifetime’s work, getting to know this material I am using now – these words, their histories, their ways of signalling. Ciaran thought about language at the cellular level, letter by letter. And he found a way to make the words we tend not to notice, Until Before After, do an extraordinary work.

Language and voice – these are not just matters of the intellect, but also of the body. Denise Riley begins her brilliant book, Impersonal Passion, by thinking about injurious speech, the language of anger and accusation we’ve all experienced, and the way these words from elsewhere lodge themselves in the body and reverberate. We speak, but we are also spoken. Language comes from within us, but it is always already outside us, too. That could take me back to ‘Belfast Confetti’: ‘What is / My name? Where am I coming from? Where am I going?’ The language we use in private thought we share with more public, political discourses. ‘I am a walker in language’, Riley writes. It’s a good way to be.

As for my own voice or voices, hopefully I’m not too conscious of too much! The project you mentioned, Listening to Voices, was a very special process to have been part of. I’m interested in how the body speaks, and in the kinds of hierarchies we impose on different speech forms. Listening as a practice – that’s another lifetime’s work! Not just to voices, but all sorts of sounds. As this interview is happening, I’m also listening to Stars of The Lid. This makes me think of something in Adam Phillips’ book, The Beast in the Nursery: ‘psychoanalysis is one way of speaking up for formative linguistic incompetence, for the necessary relationship between our verbal uncertainty and our fluency; for the profit of loss. It is a paradox, perhaps best captured in music (or tones of voice), that it is sounds and silence that link us to our earliest states of being. Our parents may have spoken words to us as babies, but they were not words to us.’ Formative linguistic incompetence! Our uncertainty using language – that’s the kind of humility and curiosity I think might be worth preserving. T.S. Eliot suggests that poetry communicates before it’s understood. Robert Frost affirms the importance of sound in any attempt at making sense of things. And Seamus Heaney lets this inform his poetics, playing with ‘fother’ and ‘fodder’. It starts early – what we hear as babies are voices and sounds. Only then do we realise we’ve begun taking a walk in language.

MD: Your new publication, Fothermather, is a result of winning the Ink Sweat and Tears Pamphlet Commission Competition. In the introduction you speak of how at first you envisaged that the poems for the pamphlet would be an investigation of ‘non-biological queer parenthood’, but after the birth of your son Finn, this changed to become a more general examination of language. To the question of ‘how anyone names anything’. I’m really interested in how this change of focus came about. Could you say a little about the process?

GMCC: ‘Fothermather’ is a kind of nonsense word that tells the truth. It’s a mixture of ‘father’ and ‘mother’ that appears in a poem called ‘Untitled / Villanelle’. When I started writing Fothermather the question of how Finn would name me – and how I might signal to Finn how to name me – felt like a pressing one. It was foremost in my mind as my partner carried Finn. When he arrived, nothing was the same. It’s hard to put into words – the extraordinary experience of watching someone come into the world and being one of the two people they’re looking to, moment to moment – I’m still coming to terms with the change. Or trying to find the terms. Finn arrived with a cry. We heard him before we saw him. He used his voice. And by that sound we knew him. Since then, he’s been trying to teach me a lot about how sounds are made, how meanings cleave, how language happens. That makes me think of something else in Riley’s book where she quotes Tristan Tzara: ‘thought is formed in the mouth’.

‘Fothermather’ is playfully genderqueer, but I wanted to do more than play with gender and queerness. I wanted to let a kind of baby talk into the poetry – that gorgeous babble Finn makes. And the gorgeous babble I made, first as a baby, and then as an adult joining in with Finn. In the last part of the book, I use ‘fothermather’ as an alphabet, playing with the letters and phrases inside it. What emerges is a shared language, so pleasing in its simplicity: ha ha ma ma. So in the end, the question wasn’t so much ‘how will you name me?’ as it was ‘how will we learn the names and try to name and know this world together?’ I hadn’t thought enough about the reciprocity involved in language. But Finn changed all that.

MD: What’s next for you in terms of your poetry? What are you working on next?

GMCC: I’m looking forward to launching Fothermather in Norwich on 11th November and in Belfast at No Alibis on 19th. And I’m delighted to be working with Conor Garrett, making a programme based on Fothermather for Radio 4. Beyond that, I’ve been working on a book for a while which I hope might make its way into the world soon, and I have a few things I’d like to try. So we’ll see. More walks in language! Some more sleep would be good, too...

Thank you for this excellent series of questions, Moyra. I’ve really enjoyed thinking about these things at your prompts. 

Fothermather can be purchased here: http://www.inksweatandtears.co.uk/pages/?page_id=5711