American poet Professor Donna Potts arrived in Ireland for the first of four visits and found that poetry seemed to be at the centre of everything, from the decoration of airports to the design of banknotes. Recipient of a Fulbright Lecturing Award to University of Galway from 1997 to 1998, she found herself immersed in a culture where poetry seemed inseparable from daily life. She returned to Galway several times, drawn to the landscape that once inspired James Joyce. In those fleeting moments, the division between art and life had “faded utterly”.
Cois Coiribe had the chance to connect with Prof Potts and ask her what it was about Galway that consistently drew her back, inspiring her creative work as well as volumes on poet Francis Harvey, environmentalism, and Irish literature and trauma. Here she describes her dreamlike visits and explains how, for her, poetry became empowerment.
“Is my life a dream?” he asks,
“Because sometimes I think I imagined
this world and I’ll wake up in the real one.”
“Poetry makes nothing happen,” writes W.H. Auden in his poem about Yeats, and life in the United States seldom gives people any reason to doubt his contention. As Howard Nemerov said, in America, poets are, “for the most part, an impertinence, like birds at an airport”. But on my first trip to Ireland in 1997, I could have sworn poetry made everything happen. Lines of poetry were embroidered into the seats on our Aer Lingus flight; Dublin Airport graced its walls with large pictures of Irish writers; and the money dispensed from the ATM featured Irish writers, thanks to the government’s earlier selection of W.B. Yeats to design the money. Somehow, I couldn’t imagine our federal government letting poets loose to design our money.
In Galway, where we spent my Fulbright year, we visited the church next to Presentation Convent because we planned to send our son to Presentation School across the canal. A nun from the convent invited us in for tea, so we sat where James Joyce’s wife Nora Barnacle had once worked. Pubs displayed posters of Irish writers, and when my husband visited one such pub while serving on the Irish equivalent of the PTA, a parent with only a fourth-grade education spent the evening reciting poems by those writers. I met the poet John Montague at the Claddagh Hall, and the writer John McGahern in a class taught by Kevin Barry, the department chair. When my son and I were walking down Shop Street, he asked me, “Is my life a dream, and some day I’ll wake up and be in the real world?” which inspired me to write a poem called “Waking Dreams.” His question had hurled me back to my own dreamlike years following my father’s suicide, and I began writing poetry again.
On Bloomsday I met Mary and Emer, grandniece and great grandniece of Nora Barnacle’s early love, Michael Bodkin, a.k.a. Michael Furey, Joyce’s fictional portrait of Bodkin in his story, The Dead. After the celebration, Mary and Emer walked me home, pointing out sites associated with Nora, James and Michael. It had been raining all evening, and a man with a fine tenor voice had sung “The Lass of Aughrim”, just as he had in Joyce’s The Dead, and it was as though we were all in the story together, and the division between art and life – once made so painfully clear to me, back in high school when a friend had asked me scornfully, “Why do you READ? Why don’t you just live?” – had faded utterly.
He asks as though I’m big enough
to be entrusted with such vast questions …
Seven years later we returned to spend a sabbatical in Galway, and I had an office in the Moore Centre. The economic boom that had swept Ireland meant that our American dollars could no longer buy us seats on Aer Lingus. The ATM now dispensed Euros rather than Irish pounds, and the money, now bereft of poets, was nearly as dull and nondescript as the greenbacks back home. But poetry still made something happen. Kevin Barry suggested I sit in on Moya Cannon’s class. I’d taught her poetry to my students.
Shortly after our arrival, the phone had rung, and a gentle, lilting voice said, “This is Moya Cannon.” She was looking for Jim Murphy, the owner of the house. My first reaction was to doubt that the voice could really be that of Moya Cannon, which caused my husband and son no end of amusement.
“Yeah, sure, scam artists in Ireland always claim to be poets. Works every time. Only in Ireland!”
“Well, in Ireland it just might work,” I said.
When I entered the room for her class that evening, she said in her lilting way, “You’re very welcome,” as she did for every student who entered, and she really seemed to mean it every time. I’d planned just to observe, but she encouraged me to submit my own poetry. I submitted “Waking Dreams.” The next day I got a phone call from Moya, but this time it wasn’t for Jim Murphy; it was for me. She said she’d really enjoyed the poem I wrote, and then she asked if I would like to have lunch with her.
Shortly after that, my life back in America got the better of me. I’d planned to return to the US to help a friend who’d just had a baby, and I discovered I was on the witness list for the upcoming trial of Tom Murray, my colleague who’d murdered his ex-wife the previous fall. I ended up testifying in a murder trial, in which he was found guilty. The verdict was announced after I returned to Galway once more, while we watched our daughter march with her Presentation class in the St Patrick’s Day Parade. Walking down the canal, I saw Moya Cannon on her way to campus, smiling sunnily, stopping her bicycle to chat.
“We’ve missed you in class,” she said.
She encouraged me to come back and write more poems. Poetry helped pull me from nightmares.
I wrote a poem about Murray’s ex-wife Carmin. And later, when I learned that a colleague who had harassed me at previous conferences would read his poetry in Galway, I only briefly considered avoiding his reading, until an Irish barista I’d befriended at the coffee shop suggested, “Why don’t you write a poem about it instead, and read it at the open mic after his reading?”
Shortly after that, my life back in America got the better of me. I’d planned to return to the US to help a friend who’d just had a baby, and I discovered I was on the witness list for the upcoming trial of Tom Murray, my colleague who’d murdered his ex-wife the previous fall. I ended up testifying in a murder trial, in which he was found guilty. The verdict was announced after I returned to Galway once more, while we watched our daughter march with her Presentation class in the St Patrick’s Day Parade. Walking down the canal, I saw Moya Cannon on her way to campus, smiling sunnily, stopping her bicycle to chat.
“We’ve missed you in class,” she said.
She encouraged me to come back and write more poems. Poetry helped pull me from nightmares.
I wrote a poem about Murray’s ex-wife Carmin. And later, when I learned that a colleague who had harassed me at previous conferences would read his poetry in Galway, I only briefly considered avoiding his reading, until an Irish barista I’d befriended at the coffee shop suggested, “Why don’t you write a poem about it instead, and read it at the open mic after his reading?”
Though my poem didn’t mention his name, he knew exactly who I was talking about. While I knew all about poetry as therapy, I hadn’t seriously considered poetry as empowerment, and even as weapon, until I watched the look on his face change from smug satisfaction to fear. Thanks to the Galway poet, Kevin Higgins, who taught workshops, organised readings and introduced me to Jessie Lendennie, editor of Salmon Poetry, I eventually produced a book of poetry, Waking Dreams, which took its title from the poem I’d written years earlier after walking down Shop Street.
as though I’d been hiding the truth all along,
waiting only for him to guess it.
When we returned to Galway in 2011, I was a Research Fellow in the Irish Studies Centre. Moya Cannon and Director of the Centre Louis de Paor persuaded me to go to Donegal and interview the poet Francis Harvey. Eamon Little, the remarkable director whose film Living Colour had just screened at the Galway Town Hall Theatre, drove me there, so he could record Harvey.
I edited a collection on Harvey: This Landscape’s Fierce Embrace: The Poetry of Francis Harvey and Eamon produced the beautiful radio programme: All Those Names for the Mystery of Love.
Meanwhile, I researched environmental movements in Ireland – the Shell to Sea Campaign, Burren and Bog Protests, Hill of Tara Protests – and became intrigued by the way music was integral to every protest, in the same way it had been in Ireland’s quest for independence. Nessa Cronin (Irish Literature, Environmental Humanities), Méabh Ní Fhuartháin (Irish Music and Dance Studies) and Louis de Paor had precisely the kind of expertise to support my research for a book that I titled The Wearing of the Deep Green: Contemporary Irish Writing Environmentalism.
The poet and University of Galway alumnus Michael D. Higgins was elected president.
“Ireland has her madness and its weather still,” as Auden says, but poetry continues to make something happen.
How could I answer him, then or ever?
