Quincy R. Lehr

One of the myths the Irish have about themselves, repeated often and seemingly confirmed by the periodic wunderkinds that emerge from this island, is that they somehow have the jump on the rest of the world where poetry is concerned. Since moving here in the fall of 2006, I have, on occasion, when in poetry circles, gotten that look that somehow manages to say, “Oh another returned Yank hoping for a mystical connection with the ‘Auld Sod’ and W. B. Yeats and Kavanagh and all the rest of ’em.” It’s strange how a look can say all that, but, with a few beers down and sufficient disapproval, it can.

But... I’m not an Irish-American, and it certainly isn’t a conscious goal of mine to become an “Irish Poet” (cue shuddering). Hell, most of the Irish poets I know aren’t all that into being “Irish Poets.” (Indeed, the most self-consciously “Irish” poet I know here comes from just outside Liverpool [note to American readers — that’s the place in England the Beatles are from] and has the accent to match.) Sure, you do hear the occasional guy at a poetry reading (generally one of the crap ones) going on about the Little People under the Hollow Hill with the Pot of Gold that the Avaricious Culchie Gobshite tries to feck off them, but most Irish people hate that shit as much as you do, dear reader. No,   the culture worms its way into the expat’s language and poetry through subtler means. I’ll use myself as an example — hey, because it’s easy.

Well, in the first place, there are the words and phrases. I don’t mean that you lose your accent, but rather that where words differ, one starts to use the local term. I say “parking lot” about half the time, “car park” the other half. My “comforter” has, over the course of the year, morphed into a “duvet” without changing any of its physical characteristics. And “biro” has the advantage of one less syllable than “ballpoint pen.” That the Oklahoma accent treats “pen” and “pin” as homonyms, and given that the person behind the counter of the convenience stores at which I buy said biros is often an immigrant for whom English (Irish version) is a second language, the switch makes even more sense. I’ll probably never say “half-eleven” for “eleven-thirty,” though.

And then there are the periodic specifically Irish or (don’t tell the Irish this) Brittano-Hibernian phrases. “Craic” (pronounced like “crack” as in crack cocaine) is a useful word, meaning anything from “things” (as in “How’s craic?”) to getting plastered with your buddies at the pub. “Shite,” which is like “shit” only more emphatic, is useful as well, and can be combined into nice little phrases like “shitehawk” and “gobshite.” And, of course, there’s “feck,” which I hardly ever use in the presence of Irish people, but which is useful as an alternative to “fuck” when talking to my mother on the phone.

On the whole, aside from setting my spell check to “English — Ireland” (watch this — centre, belabour, travelled), my poetic diction has remained relatively unscathed from the creeping influence of Irish English. In part, I find myself purging much of what gets in, as it just doesn’t quite look right on the page. But more importantly, not living in the United States has made me much more aware of the various American-specific phrasing, intonation, and timing in my own speech, things that, in their own context, sound perfectly normal, but stand out, even with the passage of time, when talking to people who are actually from here.

Sometimes, it’s slang. Not too long ago, I bumped into a guy at the pub who’d spent some time in the Oklahoma City area back in the 1980s — my own place of origin. He’d had a few drinks, as he told the tale, and was staggering to where he was staying a ways up Western Avenue. The cops saw him swerving along and asked him why he was walking rather than driving. “I’m pissed,” he said.

“Why are you pissed?” the cops asked in return.

“Because I’ve been drinking.”

“Why would that make you angry?”

Now, I can switch-hit, as it were, between using “pissed” to mean “drunk” and to mean “angry,” but there are subtler differences in speech as well, in inflection and emphasis, as well as in the words used themselves, and even as the vocabulary gets more familiar (and it’s really overwhelmingly shared anyway), the ways that Irish English shades its meanings are still, at times, a bit of a foreign language which I’ve managed to pick up after a year of total immersion.

And the poetic traditions are also subtly different. Have you ever tried hunting down a copy of Zukofsky’s A in a Dublin book shop? It’s about as easy to find as the latest Ciaran Carson is in, say, Kansas City. And while, yes, one can find a book by Walt Whitman on the shelves of Eason’s as easily as Heaney’s selected at an American Barnes and Noble, I certainly never memorised Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” in high school, whereas anecdotal evidence indicates that it’s more or less required here. And on the other hand, Frost’s “The Road Less Traveled,” a staple of American poetry education, is not nearly as well-known. And we definitely did not do Gerard Manley Hopkins in high school in the States.

It isn’t as if the traditions are hugely apart from one another. A poetically literate Irish person has frequently read much of what his or her American equivalent has. It’s more a matter of what is at the centre and periphery of each one’s poetic consciousness.¹ And while I’ve read more Irish poetry since coming here (if nothing else, the “Irish Poetry” sections in bookstores tend to be easier to locate than the “Poetry” sections), it has not — nor will it ever — make me into an “Irish Poet” any more than reading a bunch of Thomas Hardy or Simon Armitage or whomever will make me into an “English Poet.” We tend to borrow poetry stuff from other poets, not nationality stuff. While the “Irish” bag of tricks (in terms of what’s fashionable, what kind of poetry gets written, and so forth) varies from the “American,” it is nonetheless not reducible to nationality.

But I like to think that, somehow, I do bring something a bit different to the mix over here, and I can say that a sustained encounter of poetry in an English that isn’t quite the English I grew up speaking has made me more aware of the distinctiveness of my own voice. So, while I’ll never be an Irish Poet, and while I’m not losing any sleep over that, there are worse things to be than a poet in Ireland. And, hell, I’ve even developed something of a taste for black pudding with brown sauce.