A Note of Unscholarliness

Transcript of episode

Host: Seán Hewitt
Guest: Mícheál McCann

Episode transcripts are provided to make this podcast accessible to a wider audience. Please note that interviews featured in this episode have been edited for concision and clarity.

Mícheál McCann
It's like, I have a sunny disposition. I think being amongst human beings is the greatest gift we have. But it's not like I wake up in bed with my cats, and I throw open the curtains. Do you know what I mean? You have to, like, work hard to see the world in that way. And it's not deluded.

(Theme music starts)

Seán Hewitt
Welcome to The Glimpse. I’m your host, Seán Hewitt. Mícheál McCann is the author of three pamphlets of poems: the most recent, Keeper. His first collection, Devotion, was published in 2024, and he's the 2024 Publishing Fellow at the Seamus Heaney Center at Queen's University Belfast. Originally from Derry City, Mícheál now lives and works in Belfast and is our guest today on The Glimpse.

(Music lingers and fades out)

Seán
Mícheál McCann's debut collection, Devotion, is many things: an inhabitation of Irish literature, an account of queer life, an exploration of love and relationships, and a light-filled and tender look at domesticity. In one time-bending sequence, McCann re-inhabits the Irish lament originally composed by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, creating a heartfelt and grief-filled reimagining which places a queer love story right at the heart of the Irish tradition. His poems are unusually open and welcoming, and, I think, full of a sense of gratitude for the small moments in life that can act as a solace in an increasingly fraught world. Mícheál McCann, welcome to The Glimpse. It's so good to have you here.

Míchéal
Thanks, Seán. You've said nice things. I appreciate it. (Laughs).

Seán
You're very welcome. Where are you speaking to us from?

Míchéal
So, from the Seamus Heaney Center, actually. I burrowed down here from work up in the mountains in West Belfast, and it's very foggy. You can't see 50 feet in front of you. It's a very, sort of—this is my type of winter evening. You know, not particularly festive.

Seán
Okay, that's very different weather in Belfast than what we have here, which is unusually clear for Dublin. As I mentioned in the intro that this year your debut collection, Devotion, came out, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about how the past year since the launch of the book has been for you.

Míchéal
How's it been? So wonderful, you know; it's one of those things where it's wonderful because your thinking about publishing changes entirely when you're fortunate enough to publish a book. You strive for so long. I mean, we met when you’d just put out Lantern, I remember, and I was trying to put out pamphlets and stuff, and I think you have this idea of, like, a quest, you know, when I reach the collection stage, you know, but you're still as unsure of yourself and plodding along, and you're just sort of doing the same things, but in the way you are at that stage. So it's great. It's sort of…it's humbling, you know. It's been really good for that reason. And I feel very lucky. Like, it's been held so conscientiously by Gallery. You know, they've done a really beautiful job with it, especially with the lament and stuff. So.

Seán
How long were you working on the book?

Míchéal
Probably the guts of about two years, probably. A lot of the poems were written from about 2021 onwards. The lament in and of itself was about six months where I feel like I blacked out and came to and then just had this, like, 35-page-long poem that sort of still mystifies me a little bit. And then other poems just come in that sort of organic way that you know yourself. I don't know, it's such a thrill, isn’t it, you know? I remember talking to people who think that a book's organic. Do you know what I mean? I just think it's not a mechanical process.

Seán
Mhm... Did it change along the way a lot? The book?

Míchéal
In a way, that, I suppose. I worked with Leontia Flynn on my PhD, and I don't think the poems changed, but maybe my eye for how poems should look changed. Do you know?

Seán
Yeah. I mean, it's sort of evolution, maybe, but not necessarily always in a linear direction. I think it's like a folding inwards of inspiration and different sorts of language. The title in your book is “Keen for A–,” and Irish readers would know that poem from school, I guess, the “Keen for Art O'Leary” [Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire]. Would you tell listeners a little bit about that poem? Some of them may be unfamiliar with it. And what drew you to it.

Míchéal
Yeah. So the “Keen for Art O'Leary” was never written down. It was uttered by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill about 251 years ago, actually. Last year it was its 250th anniversary, obviously. So she's a noblewoman of sorts. Her husband, Art O'Leary, was killed by British forces in Cork at that time. And keening was a sort of a profession; you know, professional wailing women. But actually, prior to that period, even men would have done it as well. But this woman uttered this keen, so extraordinary, so sort of full of anger and this frightening desire for her husband, that people were so stunned that these other keeners took register and noted down the poem. And it's sort of long and frightening, really frightening.

And the thing that grabbed me, I remember reading it for the first time, and there's a scene where she comes across his corpse in this sort of little hilly patch. And, you know, an old woman has, she thinks, thrown like a robe over his dead, bloody body, and Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill sticks her hands into the wounds and lifts the blood and drinks it and drinks it.

And, you know, as a gay person, you know, blood is very burdened in a different way. So I suppose that was what started to set my mind going. Like I guess there's two ways to think about the past and literary canons and stuff that exclude certain kinds of people. You know, do you see that as an opportunity to carve into something or move away? I suppose for me, I love Irish literature so much, and I have enough of a note of unscholarliness about me that I just thought, “What would happen if I tried this?” And I did.

Seán
Which is a lovely freedom to push into, I think. It's a poem that's been translated many times by different poets and scholars from different backgrounds. When it comes to introducing that poem into your book of poems, with its sense of history, the violence in it, you know, the kind of otherworldliness of that poem, but also, you know, bringing it into a queer relationship with your own poems, what does that mean to you? Or, you know, how did you go about thinking about inhabiting that different angle on history? Because I think it's—an important thing that a lot of queer writers have to think about is kind of marking out an historical reference point for their own work. And either you stand firmly in the center of that canon, as I think that this poem does—it's such a radical thing to do. Or you can kind of about-face and turn against the canon completely. What was your relationship to it?

Míchéal
When I came across that poem, one thing that struck me was that it is a keen, but it’s also a love poem. And I was trying to, sort of, at that time, work through a really awful death that happened in my family. And at the same time, I feel fortunate to be in a relationship that has a lot of love in it. So I think the poem pierced me in an odd way. I will say, I wrote the poem without thinking of any of this. You know, I think, like all good poems, if you're thinking about reception or historicity or whatever, it's gonna not be worth toilet paper, you know. But I guess when I finished it, I was sort of really seized by this sense, like, “Who am I to do this?” You know? It's because it's sort of—when you're writing about queer subjects in a context that hasn't been written about, you sort of feel like, “Am I standing on people's toes?” But Seán, I don't really know how to answer your question, except to say that I was compelled to write it, and I decided to be brave and just let it.

Seán
As writers, often we're asked to kind of put logic back on a decision that we never made logically, and it could be quite difficult to retrospectively come up with the origin story of something that just arrived. It seems that Devotion as a collection is fundamentally a book of love poems or is at least pitched towards love. But underneath it, there is a lot of violence simmering, whether it's incidental violence, historical violence. Is that something that, as you were putting the book together, became apparent to you, or was it always a kind of conscious concern that you wanted to temper love with violence in the book?

Míchéal
I suppose I write a lot about family and the terrain in which I live. You know, political violence and the ramifications of that are very real. Love isn't just love blandly thrown on a wall. You know, it's so complicated by the trajectory for which it took to manifest itself, and so like, I think, as a queer person, as a person who lives in this part of Ireland, as a person who is just still alive in this part of Ireland, like, to not acknowledge violence is to just be locked in your room and not thinking about stuff that's happening outside.

Seán
What I thought was really beautiful about the book is the way that you had ordered the poems so that we kind of tumble through deepening understandings of the place in which the poems are being written from, and the poem that you're going to read for us emerges in some way out of that. Would you introduce the poem that you're going to read for us and tell us a little bit about it first, and read it for us?

Míchéal
Marilynne Robinson is a very important writer to me, and one of the things I feel like I've learned from her is that it's important that we're not all recruited into the same models of thinking. I think writers are these sort of little magpies for not just thinking and creativity, but we're just sort of these, like, cheesecloths through which so much stuff passes. And this poem that I'm going to read was me thinking about a certain kind of knowledge that I know as a queer person is true, and also an emotional truth that I feel like I want to be a parent, right? And I guess I was wrestling with the fact that two things can be true at once, or maybe, perhaps, that love breaks down book-learning quite quickly. So I'll read that, because I think talking about poems is never as good as just reading them, but you're very generous.

To an Imagined Child
by Mícheál McCann

Friends of certain militant dispositions would have kittens
Hearing me address you like this.

To have a child, they say, is a heterosexual fallacy!
There’s enough tragedy

on this drowning world without a replica of me
making matters worse. And yet

book-learning crumbles in the face of a child’s toy,
a small pink hairbrush.

I dream of you to the soft cluck of knitting needles.
You would know me

always in the same coat, waiting outside the school
well before I had to.

Maybe some part of us is meant to be weighed down,
I might say to my friends.

A diving line is often deployed in murky caves so a diver
can ascend to gentle water.

Child, I would stand still with this line around my trunk
in the shallow water

of our lives, so that you can tug twice for I’m okay,
I’m okay, Daddy,

Go well into your own life and stand among flowers
you cannot grow

and smile knowing that wherever I go you follow
as a prayer follows hope.

"To an Imagined Child" by Mícheál McCann from Devotion (2024) is reproduced by kind permission of the Author and The Gallery Press.

Seán
Thank you.

Mícheál
You're welcome.

Seán
I was really struck by the quietness and intimacy of this poem and I wanted to touch on the last line first, particularly. As you mentioned, Marilyn Robinson is one of my favorite writers too. I wonder about poems and prayers, which often kind of come up together and are sometimes seen as kindred. Does that prayer-like intention ever inform the way that you write? Do you ever see poems as being related to prayer?

Míchéal
I think so. But for me, when I'm in that zone, it doesn't come often where I want to write a poem. Or like you're on a plane, for example, and this moment of clarity—that's the only way I can understand writing poems—this moment of clarity pierces you, and you can sort of take that consciousness and impress it into a poem. I think that's just what a prayer is, it's like a hope for or an impression of something better or something different, or, like, a type of light that directs you out of the murk of your own life. So, yeah, absolutely.

Seán
I think I'm really struck by the way that you describe it. You know, the fundamental thing that really rings through all of your poems is that impression of clarity but also of hope and a sense of “things might be better.”

Kind of at the end of stanza three, you say “there's enough tragedy / on this drowning world without a replica of me / making matters worse. And yet.” And what another poet might have done might have been to make this a lengthy poem of critique of what other people might say and to take down. But you, actually, from stanza three, just lift into a dream, a sense of a better future or a different life. Do you find yourself approaching things positively, rather than succumbing maybe to the temptation to anger or critique or negativity? Is that something that's apparent to you in your own writing?

Míchéal
That’s a really beautiful question. I read a book a long time ago now by Michael Snediker called Queer Optimism. It's a book about happiness and joy, which we know in critical writing doesn't get written about a lot. And he talks about the difference between sort of naive happiness and sort of adult-informed happiness or joy, or whatever he's talking about. And to be clear, that book proceeds through, like, suicide, of not wanting to be alive anymore and persisting. And that is what informs that sort of subjectivity you're talking about. It's like, I have a sunny disposition. I think being amongst human beings is the greatest gift we have. But like, I haven't, like—that's a hard one. It's not like I just wake up in bed with my cats, and I throw open the curtains. Do you know what I mean? Like, you have to work hard to see the world in that way. And it's not deluded. Do you know what I mean?

Seán
Yeah. I don't see much poetry by men that's looking into the, kind of, the domestic sphere, and that seems to me something different here. You know, queer domesticity seems like something that might be out of fashion, or, you know, you just don't hear about it a lot. And part of the, kind of, the voices in the back of your poem that might accuse you of a heterosexual fallacy are perhaps some of the reasons why we don't hear much of this really important facet of queer life. We all have home lives as well, and I think that often queer literature is looking in other places to pull away from these ideas that it might call heterosexual, or it might say are in some ways traps into which we fall after liberation, assimilation, or something like that.

Mícheál
Sure.

Seán
It made me think about your experience with queer poetry as you started writing. I wondered what that process of discovery was like for you, and who have been your kind of guiding lights, or, you know, touchstones?

Míchéal
I had a very formative year around the age of 19, I think, when in, like, one hour I was introduced to Elizabeth Bishop and Mark Doty. You can imagine how dazzling that was for me. And I go back to both of them a lot, for very different reasons. I actually—to be honest, Mark Doty… helped me sort of write about my life in concrete terms that I never quite had access to before. But there's something about just that devastating clarity, without giving anything away, that Bishop has.

You know, Sylvia Plath has done as much for me as someone who shares the same sexuality as me. You know, I've mentioned Marie Howe before. I think of all poets living or dead, she's had the most transformative impact on me. Do you know? So…

Seán
Yeah.

Míchéal
Yes.

Seán
I can hear her in the background of your poems. And I think I'm glad you mentioned Mark Doty as well, because—you know, in a geeky way—there was something in some of your line breaks that I was like, “Oh, that's such a good line break.” And then I thought, “Yeah, that's also quite a Mark Doty line break.” “Child, I would stand still with this line around my trunk / in the shallow water,” line break, or actually stanza break, “of our lives.” And I think that “of our lives” is such a Mark Doty-esque addition, because he has this way of pulling the apparently normal, just standing with you in water, into something kind of expansive. You know, he has that kind of prayerful expansion in his poems that always seemed to me to give them a great sense of lift and kind of the unexpected. I love him too.

Okay, Míchéal McCann, we are going to take a short break now. And when we come back, you're going to tell me about one of your favorite and my favorite poets, Fiona Benson, and a poem about fireflies.

Míchéal
Sounds good.

BREAK


(Classical piano music plays)


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Seán
Míchéal McCann, we were speaking about your poem “To an Imagined Child,” and now you're going to read one of my favorite poets and, I imagine, your favorite poets as well, or else you wouldn't have chosen her: Fiona Benson. This is a poem from Firefly Suite. Would you tell us a little bit about why it is that you've chosen it and then read it for us?

Míchéal
How to summarize Fiona Benson in a few words? For anyone listening who hasn't heard of her, go and read her. She's a mixture of tender-heartedness and ferocity I've ever read and the reason I chose this poem is that she marries technical virtuosity with incredible feeling, you know, and isn't afraid to be very ugly in the poems, you know, there's like sort of a sharp jankiness to them, and then there's also incredible control. Oh, gosh, I'm actually becoming incoherent. I love her work so much.

Seán
No, I think so too. I mean, she's such a brave poet as well as an astute one, and I find her poems completely incredible. So why don't we stop gushing about it? We'll gush again afterwards. But would you read it for us?

Míchéal
Yes, I will read it. So this is the first poem from a sequence called Firefly Suite. So this poem is called “Big Dipper Fireflies (Photinus pyrales)” and it's dedicated to Mair Bosworth.



FIREFLY SUITE

I Big Dipper Fireflies (Photinus pyralis)

for Mair Bosworth

By Fiona Benson

Silently at dusk
The big dippers
rising from the grass –

green and upwards cinders,
gentle, wandering stars –
and we two on our knees

cupping them up,
holding them close,
like something we lost

at the edge of the forest
and loved.
How we are enthralled

as the soft green flush
in the lamp we make of our hands
comes and goes,

how we peer
into the improvised chambers
we make with our fingers

to see them housed,
their beetle wings
striped like sunflower seeds,


and the tender segments
of their bellies
glimmering

like tree-sap breathing,
an emerald electric pulse.
And though we’ve been disenchanted,

strangers to ourselves
in multiple prisons,
unleaved, unskyed

(I’ve been ready to lie down,
dearest dust,
I have wanted to die)

once more in wonder
the raw green girl
who lives in me still

trembles, ignites;
and we open our hands
like books, let them fly.

"Big Dipper Fireflies" from Ephemeron by Fiona Benson. Published by Jonathan Cape, 2022. Copyright © Fiona Benson. Reproduced by permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN



Seán
So good! I kind of want to talk about every single line. But you know when you read it, “their bellies / glimmering // like tree-sap breathing, / an emerald electric pulse.” And although I've never seen fireflies or Big Dipper fireflies, you almost feel that you could recreate them in your mind from this, which is a strange thing with insects as well, because they're so kind of alien to us. But even the idea of them having “beetle wings / striped like sunflower seeds, // [and] the tender segments / of their bellies / glimmering.”

We go from this quite otherworldly opening, which almost seems like a fairy-tale opening, where at the edge of the wood there are glowing things, as kind of even the sense of constellations and stars, and two people wandering towards it, and then zoom in straight down onto the tiniest tender moment. And when I said before about Fiona Benson being a brave poet, that parenthesis towards the end of the poem is such a brave moment.

Míchéal
Staggering.

Seán
“(I've been ready to lie down, / dearest dust, / I have wanted to die).” It just takes the heart out of you when you read that, because everything in that moment is suddenly weighted with its possible other life, or its past life, that seems to actually increase the form of wonder in the poem.

Míchéal
I think it's all about reenchantment, you know, like that we have these sort of improvised chambers that glow green and like this little parenthetical note doesn't detract from that, but it also is really interesting to me about how the human spirit moves towards a wonder despite, you know… I just find it so remarkable how she's managed to make that parenthesis and the glimmering, glowing, moving poem work together.

Seán
Yeah, I mean, in some way, it's a poem about reenchantment and everything that that kind of entails. It seems to me a sort of redemption of things and grace, maybe. And in some ways, having the admission in parenthesis there at once kind of gives you a sense of the disenchantment that we're moving away from and what power there must be in enchantment to do that. But also, I think, in bracketing it, it almost comes as an aside in this moment. So it doesn't actually puncture the moment of the poem. It doesn't end there. You know, we go straight back to the wonderful thing. And so the moment of tenderness is held within the poem.

Míchéal
I think it's made all the more brilliant for its presence, though. Do you know what I mean? “Brave” is the word she used, you know? But I think we are an accumulation of all the things that have brought us to the point we’re at, you know? I very much read this poem as like a flashing moment within a really extraordinarily beautiful experience. Where, “I've been ready to lay down, / dearest dust, / I have wanted to die,” and then it goes again. You know, it's miraculous, is what I would describe this and her whole work as.

Seán
I mean, to begin a sequence like this is impressive, because where are you gonna go after? (They laugh.) The idea of writing that poem and then sitting down and thinking, “Okay, and another one,” is an incredible feat that I'm extremely jealous of and amazed by. You know, I have a new sense of wonder in the world. I’ve become very sad that I haven't seen the Big Dipper firefly or had this moment myself.

Míchéal
I find myself thinking now about the term “reenchantment,” because there's nothing divine going on here, you know, like the very title of the poem, even the little sort of Latin species note, indicates, like, there's nothing miraculous about this, you know? And I think an extraordinary way for me to think about this poem is “this was here all along,” you know?

Seán
I think that this poem and the sequence was part of a project for Fiona. Wasn't it about biodiversity and insects? And I think that you can listen to the podcasts that Mair Bosworth produced of this, of this sequence. Am I right?

Míchéal
I think you’re right. I remember that.

Seán
That’s where it comes from, and I think that part of the precision in the language is obviously Fiona's, but it's also kind of informed by the sort of close attention that scientists do as well. And maybe the bracketed kind of species name there is a bridging of the gap between the poet’s worldview. The “Big Dipper fireflies” is kind of the poet's way of describing and then the Latinate name is the scientific and in this poem, they kind of blend together. You know, there's such small precision in the language, and then it has this lift which feels poetic as well. I don't know, I think that there's something that feels almost collaborative about the way that this poem comes together.

Míchéal
I mean, I'm sure listeners are thinking this is a minute, but one of the greatest honors of my whole life is realizing that you can just live a life talking about poems. Like, we've been talking about a parenthesis for how long? But what we're doing in the world we live in is one of the few things that doesn't hurt anyone. We're talking about parentheses and like, you know…(They laugh.) But I'm serious, like, and that's so extraordinary to think.

Seán
Well, I mean, in some ways it's, you know, you were talking about kind of the redirection of attention. And that's kind of what reading poems like this does to us, even for a half an hour in the day. You're pulled towards an attention on something as small, as small as a parenthesis, and what it might make you feel, or how strangely brave, you know, three lines of poetry can be in the middle of a poem. So there is something in that. I don't know what we should apologize for. Yeah. What are you working on now?

Míchéal
None of your business. (They laugh.)

Seán
I like it when people refuse.

Míchéal
(He laughs.) I am working on my second book of poems at the minute, which sort of orbit the lives of the saints—hagiography—where I'm zoning in and out of written lives, unwritten lives, my family, otherwise, and it's fun. It's very different. And, yeah, I'm writing, that is what I'm doing.

Seán
That is very exciting. As I'm talking to you now, I can literally just put my hand above my bookcase and pull out the Penguin Dictionary of the Saints, which I used to have by my bed. I found it in a charity shop, and I would every night or so, do, you know, letter E of the saints. And there's such incredible stories and so much variety in them. I can't wait to see what you do with them. That is very exciting news.

Míchéal
You’re very nice.

Seán
Míchéal McCann, it has been a real pleasure talking to you. Thank you for taking the time to come on The Glimpse.

Míchéal
It was a gift. Thanks, Seán.

Seán
Thanks for joining us today. I’m your host, Seán Hewitt.

Mícheál’s poem "To an Imagined Child" is from Devotion, published in 2024 and aired with the kind permission of the Author and The Gallery Press.

Fiona Benson’s poem “Big Dipper Fireflies” is from Ephemeron published by Jonathan Cape in 2022. Copyright © Fiona Benson. It was aired with the permission of the author, care of Rogers, Coleridge & White.

Coming up next week, poet Nithy Kasa talks about the challenge of balancing her life, identity, and work between Dublin and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

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