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Volume IV, No. 1/November 2001
Examining How Language Holds Out Hope
An interview with Ciaran Carson
JCN: What is the situation and atmosphere in Northern Ireland today?
CC: It’s hard to say. It’s confused at the moment. There’s still quite a strong element of hope that the agreement which was made some years ago in Ireland will still hold up and that through that agreement, which was signed up to by all of Ireland, by and large, that the situation will improve. The way it’s going at the moment it’s stuck as it has been for the past 18 months or a year. It’ll stay stuck I think for some time. By and large, I think, there is still a hopefulness and there’s certainly a certainty that it can’t go back to how it was before.
JCN: How have "The Troubles" influenced arts and culture in general in Northern Ireland?
CC: It’s hard to say. On one hand, the writers say they’re expected to have a statement about The Troubles and both sides expect them to articulate their ideals. But the writers may feel that their art should be not about that straightforwardness, but should say: "Who knows? Should we just stand back and say ‘Is this the only way of doing things? Can there not be another way of doing things?’ To examine how language can hold out hope, how the whole thing is structured in the language." I think that’s an interesting thing. Since the Irish stopped the war there’s been a re-examination of the words for the future. How can both sides express themselves in languages which will agree? There’s a search on now, I think, for the right words.
JCN: How have they impacted your work personally?
CC: There was poetry which I wrote in the 80's when the situation in Northern Ireland was fairly bad and fairly anxiety ridden. Now I don’t know whether you can say that those poems were a response to the violence or whether they were just observing the violence or whether they were holding out some kind of a way of seeing the violence as being possibly ironic and, at times, absurd. A lot of the work I did then emerged out of stories which I heard and published. You would know about some guy who was there and then somebody else would say, "No, that’s not the event I saw. I know another guy who saw this, you know?" Later you would hear the same event described on the BBC. So, you were hearing it from that source; you were hearing it from the source of the Army, and the statement about the event from the RUC, and then from the guy in the pub who would have another statement about it. Then you might run into the guy who actually held the gun. So, all the statements, all the stories weren’t exactly the same. So, when you write about that, you give another angle on it. There is no such thing as an objective account of what goes on. It’s often said, "Why can’t the people of Northern Ireland settle down?" As if there were some objective account to it, as if there is what somebody might call the key to it. But surely what the whole thing is about is ‘that I’ve got a viewpoint and somebody else has got another viewpoint, etc.’
JCN: Beneath the images of conflict and violence there lies something sustaining about daily life and living. Can you comment on this and its importance.
CC: Yes. I think that you could say that some of the poems speak in the voice of a storyteller who says that the ordinariness of life is very important. It comes down to that, it comes down to things which are very exact in terms of their taste and their touch and their smell, you know. That’s life, isn’t it?
JCN: Will your poetry and its themes change to reflect the evolving social and political landscape?
CC: I presume they have. I mean if they haven’t, I don’t know. Certainly the style of stuff I’m doing now isn’t what it was in the 80's, you know. Strangely enough the poems I write now are more formalized. They scan and rhyme and stuff like that. It’s just strange to me in a way. I didn’t think when I started off in this game that I’d end up at the age I am now doing poems with rhyme and scan – old-fashioned in the sense of the word.
JCN: Especially coming out of a city and a country that’s sort of identified by its violence.
CC: Well, again, I think that the fact that I have come around to that, that I’ve come around to poems which rhyme and scan comes out of the whole thing in Ireland about song. And even in the poems which are apparently free verse of some kind or another, even in those poems there’s still a sense I think of a long, song line in them. But the line – the apparently haphazard line – is actually attached to an idea of song and in Ireland the idea of song is still there. So you come back to the rhymes again, you know. The old rhymes are still there, hammering away.
JCN: What do you see as the future of art and poetry in Northern Ireland?
CC: I can’t say to be honest. I don’t see a lot emerging at the moment. I’m not sure, but I don’t see anybody young at the moment who’s doing anything with spark at all. I don’t know. So, I can’t say ‘Oh, yes, it’s gonna be great.’ But at the moment I don’t think that there’s an awful lot happening.
Ciaran Carson is a poet from Northern Ireland. He read at UMass Boston in the spring.
