Michael Foley is a Derry writer who lives in London, where he worked as a Lecturer in Information Technology at the University of Westminster before taking early retirement to concentrate on writing. He has published four novels, four non-fiction books and six poetry collections. His latest book is a long poem, The Whole Thing (Mica Press 2023, available from micapress.co.uk). There are details of all these on his website michael-foley.net.

James Gallacher: So, Michael, this is your first poetry collection in over a decade, can you shed a bit of light onto your initial motivations in writing it, in terms of timing/contexts/themes & contents?

Michael Foley: About fifteen years ago I had what I thought was an amazingly original insight – that everything is relation and process. Then I discovered that this is one of the oldest ideas in human history, a theme that turns up in various forms everywhere from Heraclitus, Ovid and Lucretius through to contemporary physics, organisation theory and even theology. Process Theology claims that even God is process and is constantly changing. Any idea that can rebrand God must have something, so I permitted it to rebrand me. It’s informed much of what I’ve written since, including The Whole Thing.

JG: Following on from that, why a long poem? Is this a form you are familiar with/feel is particularly suited to your subject matter?

MF: The process idea is that everything is connected so in order to understand anything you have to understand everything. I wanted to write about the minutiae of an ordinary day in the life but this required an understanding of the life which in turn demanded an understanding of the history of the universe, though only from the Big Bang. All this was never going to fit in a haiku. The prospect of a long poem horrified me – the most time-consuming and unpublishable thing to embark on. And I’ve enjoyed very few long poems myself so there were few inspirational models. I made a strenuous effort not to write it but it kept demanding to be written. And it was indeed time-consuming - ten years work - and every bit as difficult to publish as I expected.

JG: Throughout the text, I noticed a recurring pattern of explorations or depictions of the sacred/spiritual offset very bluntly by an almost gleeful engagement with the profane e.g. “A jubilant clarion, herald of the morning […] a succinct but wholly distinctive fart from Roy next door” – Can you explain some of your impulse behind these sequences, what – if anything – do they indicate about your perspectives on the world around you?

MF: Not ‘almost gleeful’ – totally gleeful. I love the idea of combining extreme opposites such as the sacred and profane, spiritual and material. In fact one running gag in the poem is the combination of the mundane and trivial and the big ideas of history, philosophy and science, moving abruptly from cosmology to chopping carrots, from the origin of life to the pleasure of fitting an orange juice carton into a narrow space on a fridge shelf.

JG: Similarly, when images of the divine are explored, they are frequently countered or undermined by a subsequent, dismissive qualification e.g. “God and a nobody […]enough revelation for one day” -  Does this hint at some of your own positions on questions of faith or lack thereof?

MF: I’m an atheist, though I try to avoid the term because it’s too portentous. But God keeps turning up in my writing, even in a poem about Derry, Talking to God on the new bridge over the Foyle. ‘God’ is a concept and word with terrific heft so why leave it to religion? I think of God as a fictional character who doesn’t exist but is inspirational – like Leopold Bloom. And as for my own ‘faith’, which may not be the right word, it’s summed up in a line from the poem, ‘Life is absurd … but divinely absurd.’

JG: Developing that a little further, I notice that while there are entreaties to various belief systems throughout the poem, Catholicism seems to form something of an intellectual scaffold on which you build your explorations of daily life, almost like an infrastructure of seeing, if not necessarily believing – Does Catholicism inform the way you view life and your place within it?

MF: I grew up in Derry steeped in Catholicism so, like God, it has continued to fascinate me. The Derry version was really bizarre, contradicting everything in the New Testament so completely and exactly you could almost believe people had read it. I made this contrast the theme of my first novel, The Passion of Jamesie Coyle which imagined Christ in Derry, a great subject for comedy. Spoiler alert – it doesn’t end well.

JG: As a young poet, you were very upfront about the influence Patrick Kavanagh played on your work, does the confessional tone you strike in parts of the poem suggest his work continues you inform you as a writer?

MF: I was indeed heavily influenced by Kavanagh and other autobiographical poets like Berryman and Larkin. But I came to believe that relying solely on autobiography is not enough. For a start, what do you do when you’ve used up the autobiographical material? Kavanagh, Berryman and Larkin all ended in alcoholic despair. And self-obsession becomes boring. The Whole Thing obviously has a strong autobiographical element but also much much more.

JG: At times you veer into a metapoetic, almost stream-of-consciousness, style of narration – how did that process work, and why did you adopt it?

MF: Stream-of-consciousness is a prose technique, hardly ever used in poetry. I don’t know why not. Poetry has become good at catching how people actually speak but not at how they actually think. Stream-of-consciousness seemed a good way of connecting mental flux with the greater flux of the world, to illustrate a theme of The Whole Thing, that as the title suggests, everything is a unified flux.

JG: There is a consistent undercurrent of humour and comedic observation in the poem – do you feel it important to find the funny side of life, even while grappling with some of its most serious questions?

MF: The phrasing of your question implies that there’s something odd, unusual and difficult about combining comedy and seriousness. But for me the comic vision is the ultimate seriousness. As the poem puts it, ‘nothing is more serious than comedy because nothing is more comical than seriousness’. This is another idea I got from Kavanagh who says somewhere that tragedy is under-developed comedy, a typically extreme Kavanagh pronouncement. Kavanagh, Berryman and Larkin all used humour in their poetry. But this is very different from light verse, which I hate because it’s facetious. Facetiousness is social humour, a way of avoiding reality, whereas comedy is a way of coming to terms with it.

JG: You are, in your own words, “sixty-nine for fuck’s sake” – how have you noticed your approach to writing and poetry shift over the years? Has it become more difficult or simpler as you’ve aged?

MF: I’m now seventy-five for fuck’s sake, which I wanted to put in the poem, but ’seventy-five’ didn’t fit rhythmically. And, of course, my approach to everything has changed over the years, as it does for everyone whether they like it or not. ‘Resistance to change is itself change’. I still have the scathing Derry humour, which means I’m constantly accused of being cynical, but I hope I’ve grown out of the Derry cynicism. In many ways I think I’ve become madly idealistic. As for writing, it’s more difficult because I’m acutely aware of limited time (seventy-five for fuck’s sake) and want to make what I say count, but simpler because I’m going for what I called ‘the senescent sublime’. This is the late style that no longer gives a shit about fashion or critics or reception or popularity, or what anyone thinks, and just does what it feels like, follows its own nose, goes for broke. A long poem throwing in science and philosophy, that no one will read? Why not for fuck’s sake?

JG: Finally, on the subject of ageing, can you offer us any hints as to what might be next for you poetically, do you have any new projects on the horizon?

MF: I’m always working on several projects simultaneously – poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Also crazy – it’s three separate careers with different publishers and readers and almost no overlap. But I love all three. In poetry I’m working on a collection that gets away from autobiography in two ways – thing poems about ordinary objects like zips, scissors, can-openers, jugs and hammers, and monologues by people I like – Hokusai and Fernando Pessoa. In non-fiction there was so much process-relational material cut from The Whole Thing that I’m putting it into a prose book. In fiction I’m back to God in a big way with The Autobiography of God, which imagines God incarnated at different times and in different cultures - ancient Rome, China, Baghdad, Europe and Victorian England. None of this may ever see the light of day – but so what? I love doing it. Writing is its own reward.

The Whole Thing can be purchased here: https://www.micapress.co.uk/the_whole_thing.aspx

James Gallacher is a lecturer in Irish literature at the University of Luxembourg.