“Where am I coming from? Where am I going? A fusillade of question marks.” — Ciarán Carson

It’s Ciarán Carson’s birthday today. He died in 2019.

Paul Muldoon’s name invariably comes up when Carson is mentioned (post about Muldoon here). They share similarities (Northern Irish settings/concerns, long chatty lines, postmodern accumulation of detail, the use of humor, and an encyclopedic approach -names, dates, places – but there the similarities end. Paul Muldoon is the “famous” one. Was there room for Ciarán Carson in the already-and-always crowded landscape of Irish poetry? Obviously there was, but it’s always a question. The recently-published volume of Ciaran Carson’s collected poems runs to almost 600 pages and got reviewed everywhere.

Carson grew up in Belfast. Irish was the sole language spoken in his household. This gave him a distinct perspective on language, a central concern in most Irish poetry. He was careful not to sentimentalize it.

Growing up in, say, County Mayo in the 1940s or 50s, it wouldn’t be that unusual to only speak Irish, but it was quite unusual in Belfast. Eventually, understandably, as a bilingual person, Carson took on translations: he is often compared to Joyce, whose language-obsession was so intense he spent 17 years writing Finnegans Wake, a book which is basically one long word-game. Carson was born in 1948. This put him in the thick of things in Belfast as events unfolded in that troubled city. Unlike many of his contemporaries, and unlike many Irish poets going back to Yeats and back, Carson did not view rural life as the key to Irish identity. He was an urban poet. Much of his work is violent and frightening, an accurate reflection of Belfast’s environment. In Carson’s early collections, Belfast is a place of interruptions – barricades, barriers, walls, ramps – never able to get from here to there in a direct line.

While there is an internal structure, Carson’s lines spill over, creating an impressionistic chaotic effect. It feels the way people talk. Read his poems out loud. His poem “Dresden” is probably his most well-known. Seek it out. Eventually, he abandoned the long line, going in for short sometimes one-word lines. The later poems are almost like lists, details, fragments.

The death of Ciarán Carson was a great loss.

There are some poems by Ciarán Carson here. Also, years ago, I wrote a post about Seamus Heaney’s essay on “Midnight Court”, which Carson translated.

But today I’ll share his poem “H”. To a Northern Irish person the letter “H” would need no explanation. His poems (to me) sound the way people actually speak. But it’s hard to get that effect, I imagine.

H

The Powers-that-Be decreed that from the—of—the sausage rolls, for reasons
Of security, would be contracted to a different firm. They gave the prisoners no reasons.

The prisoners complained. We cannot reproduce his actual words here, since their spokesman is alleged
To be a sub-commander of a movement deemed to be illegal.

An actor spoke for him in almost-perfect lip-synch: It’s not the quality
We’re giving off about. Just that it seems they’re getting smaller. We’re talking quantity.

His ‘Belfast’ accent wasn’t West enough. Is the H in H-Block aitch or haitch?
Does it matter? What we have we hold? Our day will come? Give or take an inch?

Well, give an inch and someone takes an effing mile. Everything is in the ways
You say them. Like, the prison that we call Long Kesh is to the Powers-that-Be The Maze.

QUOTES:

Ciarán Carson:

I write in English because the Irish that I spoke was the Irish of the home and I wouldn’t be able to write in the same way in Irish as I can in the English I have. If I were to write in Irish I’d have to go back and learn it all over again very well. And I feel at times that the idea that I should write in Irish because it’s the language of the Irish soul or something like this is a bit off, anyway.

Irish poet Rita Kelly:

I am reminded of Keats, Wordsworth too, especially the Prelude, the long and winding narrative to take the reader beyond the first few lines, not to mention the first movement. This ability and need to tell the longer narrative in verse is refreshingly rare, in times where compression is all. We are at pains to squeeze the lyric poem in general and the sonnet in particular down to a very significant couplet. None of that attempt is bad in itself, it just makes the tumbling, breathless, overspilling lines of Carson’s alexandrines exciting to say the least. This poet is in love with language – Latin, English, Irish, perhaps not so much Greek. He loves the exact word for everything, an Audi Quattro, a beehive, hair-do, breeze-block walls, bakelite, bread farrels, couplings, between carriages, flak, caesurae (which he rhymes with ‘slate-grey’ to echo an old Irish metre), sheepshank and clove hitch knots, cleats and staves. You are taken up in his excitement, tossed on the ‘Briny Say’ of his rich and rollicking imagination full of voices and vignettes, ‘Catestants and Protholics’ and all the vistas and views, sounds and sensations of Belfast… Carson is certainly in the ambit of Joyce, the teeming detail, the love and adoration of that which is so well-known and absorbed into the sinew of memory. The rhythm is closer to the spill and tumble of Finnegans Wake than anything else.”

Barra Ó Séaghdha, in 2002:

[Paul] Muldoon has always had the knack of inspiring awe among his peers and his elders. Ciarán Carson testifies to having written very little between 1976 and 1985: “Paul Muldoon was doing the thing so well, so why bother?” It is extraordinary that someone with Carson’s already proven gifts should have felt this, and fortunate that he was able to re-invent himself in collections like The Irish for No and Belfast Confetti.’ Further, Ciaran Carson has worked on 19th-century French poetry rather than on his contemporaries. It is arguable that there was a greater knowledge of European culture and languages among Irish writers of the pre-cappuccino era than among today’s young writers. In any case, it is worth asking just what our alleged Europeanness amounts to.

Ciarán Carson:

For years I’ve had a series of recurrent dreams about Belfast – nightmares, sometimes, or dreams of containment, repression, anxiety and claustrophobia …often, I’m lost in an ambiguous labyrinth between the Falls and the Shankill; at other times, the city is idealised and takes on a Gothic industrial beauty.

Ciarán Carson:

I get bored and angry with those who protest that traditional music, compared with the ‘big’ tradition of classical music, is limited. By the same token a lot of classical music is histrioniic and vulgar. I often think that people don’t listen enough, or that their education has made them incapable of listening […] and the same thing can apply to poetry – a lot of poets, it seems to me, are unaware of the beauty and sophistication of ‘ordinary’ speech.

 
 
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