Trevor Joyce
Biography
Co-founder of the New Writers' Press in Dublin, Trevor Joyce has published eleven volumes of poetry, including The Poems of Sweeny Peregrine (1976), his working of the middle-Irish Buile Suibhne, and stone floods (1995), which was nominated for the Irish Times Literature Prize for Poetry. His most recent publications are with the first dream of fire they hunt the cold: A Body of Work 1966–2000 (NWP & Shearsman Books, 2001), the audio CD Red Noise of Bones (Coelocanth & Wild Honey Press, 2001), and, launching at Test, What's In Store: Poems 2000–2007 (Gig & NWP, 2007). He has also published several papers on contemporary poetics, and has lectured and given public readings of his work throughout Ireland, the U.K. and the U.S.A. Joyce is a founder and director of SoundEye: The Cork International Poetry Festival and was a Fulbright Scholar for the year 2002-2003. In 2004 he was elected a member of Aosdána, the Irish Affiliation of Artists, and was the first writer to be awarded a fellowship by the Ballinglen Arts Foundation.
Poet's Note
The following is an excerpt of a talk given in the spring of 1997 to introduce the first Cork Poetry Conference. It was published in For the Birds (Mainstream/hardPressed, 1998) and subsequently in The Gig.
I’ll resume with a quotation from the American poet Joan Retallack, from the introduction to the volume of conversations she was having with the composer, writer, graphic artist and generally unknown quantity, John Cage, just before his death in 1992. "The degree to which our desire to possess beauty leads us to imitate its image rather than its processes," she says, "may (paradoxically?) make experiences of beauty harder to come by within the fluid circumstances of everyday life."
The sort of poetry I advocate, and which I think you will find very well, and variously, represented in today’s readings, is not an exclusivist one. It does not turn away from the work of Boland or Mahon or Heaney as being bad in some essential way. Certainly it does not say that such work should be ignored because it is outdated or unfashionable. There are fashions among publishers, reviewers, readers, but fashion has no valid role to play in relation to the issues I’m discussing here.
My criticism of the poets I’ve mentioned is that they are too proper, that they exclude too much, that they are depressingly predictable and fundamentally joyless. To refer back to what Retallack says, these poets are imitating the images of beauty with which they are already familiar, and nudging them occasionally towards the mess that is the world, only through a sense of guilt, I would suggest, at perpetrating such works of beauty in such a foul environment.
So, and I’m sure you can see this coming, my suggestion is that we abandon this archaic cult of beauty which imposes such a barrier between the activity of poetry and what others, with equal exclusivity, refer to as "the real world." That we step out of the domain of poetry (and the academy), and reassess our activity through a study of the processes through which beauty is generated: both the category, and the individual instances where we identify it as occurring.
The processes of the world respect no privilege, recognize no distinctions of propriety. In making this our material, we need feel no guilt at separating ourselves from the mess of the world. Seen from such a perspective, we cannot so separate ourselves, and the world is no more a mess than ourselves. Let me enlist Dogen, a thirteenth-century Japanese monk, who produced writings of incomparable inventiveness. Speaking of the active Buddha, a cosmic figure, whose actions are the processes of the world, he remarks that "there is no hiatus between flowers and the world—in great enlightenment they are equal; in great delusion they are identical. They constitute just a movement of the active Buddha’s toes in the sandals. Sometimes it is the sound of someone farting, sometimes it is the smell of urination; those who have nostrils smell it; those who have ears, body, the will to act, hear it."
Does our poetry smell the world? Are our ears, body, and will responsive to it?
The cost of such an approach is that we must forego the very mastery of language and poetic forms which have been our stock-in-trade, which have served to distinguish us from those who are "not poets." But, let me suggest, it is precisely such an assumption of mastery which causes our unease in the world. It puts us in the same position to the resources of language as technological mastery has enabled industry to adopt in relation to the resources of the natural world: we are the masters, and language is merely our slave, the instrument of our will, and we do not listen to our slaves, we don’t hear what they may tell us about what is passing in the world beyond our horizons.
Let me give you another quotation, this time from David Abram, a magician and anthropologist: "Genuine art, we might say, is simply human creation that does not stifle the nonhuman element but, rather, allows whatever is Other in the materials to continue to live and breathe. Genuine artistry, in this sense, does not impose a wholly external form upon some ostensibly ‘inert’ matter, but rather allows the form to emerge from the participation between the artist and his materials, whether these materials be stones, or pigments, or spoken words. Thus understood, art is really a cooperative endeavour, a work of creation in which the dynamism and power of earth-born materials is honoured and respected."
So, how can we listen to language, and how do we learn to understand what it tells us? To start with, we can involve ourselves in a dialogue with it, as it presents itself in literature and the poetry of the past, and of contemporary innovators outside Ireland. You will find such a dialogue with voices from the past and from elsewhere very much at work in the poets you will hear today—a dialogue which unwinds differently in each case, on each occasion, but which does not limit itself at the point where it develops beyond the boundaries of poetry as we have known it, beyond the images of beauty.
Sample Poems
"some treasure / hunters tired" and "hard words // no jawb" (pdf)
External Links
The Gig's What's in Store page, featuring a generous sampler